The heaviest responsibility rests on those who, claiming to be the intellectual leaders of the country, not only instigated its youth to take part in political campaigns, but actually placed them in the forefront of the fray. However reprehensible from our British point of view other features of a seditious agitation may be, to none does so high a degree of moral culpability attach as to the deliberate efforts made by Hindu politicians to undermine the fundamental principles of authority by stirring up the passions or appealing to the religious sentiment of inexperienced youth at the most emotional period of life.[19] Even the fact that political murders have been invariably perpetrated by misguided youths of the student class is hardly as ominous as the homage paid to the murderers' memories by whole schools and colleges. Most ominous of all is the tolerance, and sometimes the encouragement, extended to such demonstrations by schoolmasters and professors. These are symptoms that point to a grave moral disease amongst the teachers as well as the taught, which we can only ignore at our peril and at the sacrifice of our duty towards the people of India. In his last two Convocation speeches, Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee has himself felt constrained to lay special stress on the question of teachers and politics. Alluding in 1909 to "the lamentable events of the last 12 months," he maintained, "without hesitation," that "the most strenuous efforts must be unfalteringly made by all persons truly interested in the future of the rising generation to protect our youths from the hands of irresponsible people who recklessly seek to seduce our students from the path of academic life and to plant in their immature minds the poisonous seeds of hatred against constituted Government." This year he was even more outspoken, and laid it down that even the teacher "who scrupulously abstains from political matters within his class-room, but at the same time devotes much or all of his leisure hours to political activities and agitation, and whose name and speeches are prominently before the world in connexion with political organizations and functions," fails in his duty towards his pupils; for "their minds will inevitably be attracted towards political affairs and political agitation if they evidently constitute the main life-interest and life-work of one who stands towards them in a position of authority." Teachers should therefore avoid everything that tends "to impart to the minds of our boys a premature bias towards politics."