Page:A Nation in Making.djvu/83

tion in his honour at the Town Hall. Sir Ashley Eden was one of the ablest of the Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal. He was a Haileybury man and an official of the old type. He had many friends among the aristocracy and the Bengalee leaders of his time. He was on familiar terms with Maharaja Jotindra Mohon Tagore, and held Kristo Das Pal in great esteem. Let it also be said to his credit that in social life he made no distinction between Europeans and Indians, and it was during his time that Mr. B. L. Gupta of the Bengal Civil Service, who was then Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, submitted the note that became the genesis of the Ilbert Bill controversy. If he had continued to be Lieutenant-Governor, I believe, he would have kept the Civil Service well in hand and the Bill would have had a different termination.

All this was to his credit, but he was a bureaucrat to the marrow of his bones, and had a profound distrust of all progressive institu- tions. Mr. Buckland tells us in his Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors that Lord Ripon said of him that he had never known a man less likely to be led away by vague sentiment or mere theory than Sir Ashley Eden. This was only a euphemistic way of saying that he was singularly free from the domination of ideals, and that he had no higher conception of the duties of an administrator than to do the day's work and be satisfied with it. He was a strong supporter of the Vernacular Press Act and had no love for a free Press, or free institutions.

Of representative govenment he said that it was a sickly plant in its own native soil, and as to its being tried in India, that was out of the question.

A ruler with such ideas could not command either the affection or the esteem of the new school that had risen in Bengal, and which looked forward to the birth of a new India, with free and pro- gressive institutions. To his personal friends he had endeared himself by bestowing on them, or on others on their recommenda- tion, titles, distinctions and public offices. They were grateful to him. Their desire to honour him was natural; but they had no right to speak in the name of the community, who saw nothing in his administration to entitle him to the honour of a public demonstra- tion. It was this line that I took up in the Bengalee and wrote a series of articles. I made it quite clear that if a public meeting were held, there would be a protest against the public character of the demonstration. The hint was taken; and the Town Hall meeting, which was to have been called in the name of the public, resolved