The Congress was at last passing under Extremist control. Its first session during the war was held in December 1914 in Bombay, and under the presidency of Mr. Bupendranath Basu, afterwards a member of the Secretary of State's Council, the proceedings reflected the general enthusiasm with which India had rallied to the cause of the Empire. But before the Congress met again a disease common amongst Indians and aggravated by overwork and anxiety had carried away in April 1915, still in the prime of life, the founder of the "Servants of India Society," Mr. Gokhale, himself perhaps the greatest servant of India that has toiled in our time for her social as well as her political advancement. His friends believed that in his case the end was precipitated by an acute controversy with Mr. Tilak, to whom he had made one last appeal to abandon his old attitude of irreconcilable opposition. A few months later, in November, the veteran Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who had fought stoutly ever since Surat against any Congress reunion, in which he clearly foresaw that the Moderates would be the dupes of the Extremists, passed away in his seventy-first year, but not before he had sent a message, worded in his old peremptory style, to Sir Satyendra Sinha, daring him to refuse the chairmanship of the coming session which was to be held in December in Bombay. Sir Satyendra came, and his great personal influence kept the Indian National Congress on the rails, and defeated the projects already on foot once more for delivering it into the hands of Mr. Tilak and his followers. But the death of those two pillars of the Moderate party at such a critical juncture proved to be an irreparable loss. When Mr. Gokhale's political testament was published, it was dismissed by the Extremists as a well-meant but quite obsolete document. The Congress found a new and strange Egeria in Mrs. Besant, who had thrown herself into Indian politics when, owing to circumstances[2] which had nothing to do with politics, the faith that many respectable Hindus had placed in her, on the strength of her theosophical teachings, as a vessel of spiritual election was rudely shaken. But nothing shook the mesmeric influence which she had acquired over young India by preaching with rare eloquence the moral and spiritual superiority of Indian over Western creeds, and condemning the British administration of India, root and branch, as one of the worst manifestations of Western materialism. With her remarkable power of seizing the psychological moment, she had fastened on to the catchword of "Home Rule for India," into which Indians could read whatever measure of reform they happened to favour, whilst it voiced the vague aspiration of India to be mistress in her own house, and to be freed from the reproach of "dependency" in any future scheme of reconstruction. She herself gave it the widest interpretation in _New India_, a newspaper whose extreme views expressed in the most extreme form drew down upon