The Partition of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some 70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the three great "Presidencies" of India, of their capital as the capital city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities, though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities Act. They resented the Partition, against which they had no remedy, as a wanton _diminutio capitis_ inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders in pressing the claims of India to political emancipation from bureaucratic leading-strings. That in the new province of Eastern Bengal, which was to be created by the Partition, the Mahomedans would constitute a large majority and enjoy advantages hitherto denied to them as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the Western-educated classes. They recognised his great intellectual gifts and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee "nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, "_Bande Materam_," or "Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended. Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India--the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do with the Partition. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener,