The Report was a document of such magnitude and complexity, and went so boldly to the roots of Indian government and administration, that even amongst the absorbing preoccupations of the war, which was only just emerging for the Allies from the terrible crisis of March-April 1918, its publication at once provoked a considerable stream of criticism. On the whole, British public opinion was favourable, though there was a small but not uninfluential group of British reactionaries who at once took up, and have ever since maintained, the position that the Report meant, not the mending, for which they saw, moreover, very little need, but the ending of British rule in India. Equal divergencies occurred in Indian public opinion. An Extremist gathering in Madras declared roundly that "the scheme is so radically wrong in principle and in detail that in our opinion it is impossible to modify or improve it." In vain had Mrs. Besant been released from her modern _oubliette_ before Mr. Montagu started for India. "The scheme," she wrote in her haste, on the very day of its publication, "is unworthy to be offered by England or to be accepted by India." In vain had Mr. Montagu allowed himself to be garlanded by Mr. Tilak, who was not far behind Mrs. Besant in pronouncing the scheme to be "entirely unacceptable." The Calcutta Provincial Conference of the Congress party held a few days later abounded in the same sense, and a special session of the whole Congress convoked in August in Bombay was only in form somewhat less bitterly uncompromising, and only because it began to realise that the secession of the more moderate elements was likely to reduce "the Parliament of India" to a mere rump. Moderate opinion had not committed itself to acceptance of the scheme as precipitately as the Extremists to its rejection, but against rejection pure and simple it set its face at once, and it rallied so steadily and surely to acceptance that few of the Moderates attended the Provincial Congress, where they were promptly howled down, and they determined to hold a Conference of their own in opposition to the special Congress session. At this Conference, as well as in the Committee of non-official members of the Indian Legislative Council, there was a good deal of disjointed criticism of various recommendations in the Report, not infrequently due to misunderstanding of their import, but on the whole it was recognised as representing a great triumph for the cause of political progress on constitutional lines and therefore for the educated opinion of India. The breach between the Extremists and the Moderates was clearly defined by Mr. B.L. Mitter, a prominent Moderate of Calcutta and a member of the new Moderate organisation, the "National Liberal League":