A very heavy responsibility must at the same time attach to those responsible both at home and in India for the extraordinary tolerance too long extended to this criminal propaganda. For two whole years it was carried on with relative impunity under the very eyes of the Government of India in Calcutta. Month after month they must have seen its audacity grow in direct proportion to official apathy. They must have seen a reign of lawlessness and intimidation spread steadily over a great part of the Metropolitan province. The failure of the ordinary machinery of justice to check these crying evils was repeatedly brought home to them. Yet it was not until 1908 that the necessity of exceptional measures to cope with an exceptional situation was tardily and very reluctantly realized. The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year. The Press Act of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow of printer's ink and with it the worst forms of crime to which it maddened the feverish blood of Bengal. But some of those who are most intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the revolutionary movement hold strongly that none of these enactments had such an immediately sobering effect as the deportation of the nine prominent Bengalees who were arrested at the end of 1908. Such a measure is, I know, very repugnant to British traditions and British sentiment, and in this particular instance it unfortunately included two men whose criminal guilt was subsequently believed not to be altogether beyond doubt, though it may well have been argued that by financing and administering a dangerous organization such as the _Anusilan Samiti_ they made themselves responsible for the deeds of its members. Nevertheless, the deportation struck just at that type of agitator whose influence is most pernicious because it is most subtle, and whose responsibility is greatest because of his more experienced years and greater social position. Such a measure, however, is only warranted in extreme circumstances and cannot be transformed into indefinite detention. The grounds on which Government announced the release of these deportees last winter were even more unhappily chosen than the moment for the announcement, but the event seems so far to have justified Lord Minto's confidence, though one of the deported agitators, Pulin Bahari Das, of Dacca, has had to be rearrested and is now under trial at Dacca for conspiracy of a most serious character. There is still much lawlessness in both Bengals.[9] The continued prevalence of political dacoities, and especially the difficulty experienced in securing legal evidence against them, are distinctly unfavourable symptoms. There are many peaceful citizens who will give private information as to the outrages committed by these bands, consisting mainly of youths of respectable connexions, but that so few have the courage to face terrorism by going into the witness-box shows that the secret societies which inspire such terror have not yet been broken up. The extent to which disaffection is rampant in the native Bar also hampers the administration of justice, for whilst there is an eager competition for earning political notoriety by an eloquent defence of political prisoners, it is sometimes difficult to find pleaders who will undertake to conduct prosecutions. On the other hand, it is all to the good that many of those who were ready to coquet with sedition in its earlier stages or who had not the moral courage to speak out against it seem now to be taking heart, and in this respect the reforms embodied in the Indian Councils Act have usefully supplemented the sobering effect of repressive legislation. For one of the stock arguments of "advanced" politicians has been the failure of the "moderates" to obtain any recognition from Government, and the enlargement of the Legislative Councils took the sting out of that taunt. Independently, however, of the reforms, the extreme violence of language and of methods which had come into vogue was bound to produce some reaction. Amongst the educated classes, many respectable fathers of families, whatever their political opinions may be, have taken fright at the growth of turbulence and insubordination in schools and colleges, which were often carried into the home circle; for when once the principle of authority has been undermined the parent's authority cannot remain unshaken.