Such then was the information on which the Local Government had to act. Does the Council still wonder that action of the nature taken was taken? To those who protest that the information held by Government was unreliable I can only reply that it has been fully corroborated not only by what has happened in other Provinces and by published documents of the non-co-operation movement but also by what has happened under our very noses in this Province. The non-co-operators say that it was never in contemplation to make an attack on Basantpur police-station on the 10th December. We believe that this particular experiment was nipped to the bud by the Notification of the same date, which found the leaders assembled at Chapra and threw them into consternation. But how do they explain the raids which were actually made at a somewhat later date on the police-station of Sonbarsa, Raghupur and Mahua in the District of Muzaffarpur, or the attempt to picket the Gaya Civil Courts on the opening day after the X'mas holidays, which was only frustrated by the despatch of troops from Patna to Gaya on the previous evening? Were all these fortuitous and accidental? Do all these evidences of intention exist only in the heated imagination of the police? I shall have occasion later to tell the Council what effect these raids have had on the internal condition of the Muzaffarpur District. My present object is only to prove that when the Local Government took action under the Criminal Law Amendment Act on the 10th December, they were fully justified in believing that the civil disobedience movement would be started at a very early date in the Tirhut Division. I do not wish to weary the Council by going into details regarding the Patna _hartal_. It seemed to Government, and with good reason, that efforts were being made to impose an intolerable tyranny on the citizens of Patna at a time when the representatives of the people, who sit in this Council, had extended to his Royal Highness a most cordial welcome and had voted a special grant to make that welcome worthy of the occasion. The object of the non-co-operators was to substitute for the welcome the same kind of deliberate insult that had been attempted to be offered to the Royal visitor at Benares and Allahabad. Government, I say, would have been open to the gravest reproach if it had made no effort to counteract that mean and wicked project, which was so foreign to the innate hospitality and reverence of the Indian people, and particularly repugnant, one would imagine, to the sturdy loyalty of Bihar. Under this double compulsion then Government decided that the time had come to follow the example of its neighbours. Members of Council know as well as I do what followed. There was, as Government expected there would be, much excitement in the city--the stirring of a hornet nest always has this sort of reaction.