venting the bitterness engendered by social slights, real or imaginary, or by disappointments in Government service. Such appears to have been the _etat d'ame_ of Bengal when the Government of India promulgated the measure of administrative redistribution known as the Partition of Bengal. CHAPTER VII. THE STORM IN BENGAL. The merits or demerits of the Partition of Bengal have already been discussed to satiety. As far as its purpose was to promote administrative efficiency it is no longer on its defence. Bengal proper is still the most populous province in India, but it has been brought within limits that at least make efficient administration practicable. The eastern districts, now included in the new province, which had been hitherto lamentably neglected, have already gained enormously by the change, which was at the same time only an act of justice to the large Mahomedan majority who received but scanty consideration from Calcutta. The only people who perhaps suffered inconvenience or material loss were absentee landlords, pleaders, and moneylenders, and some of the merchants of Calcutta, Anglo-Indian as well as native, who believed their interests to be affected by the transfer of the seat of provincial government for the Eastern Bengal districts to Dacca. Nevertheless the Partition was the signal for an agitation such as India had not hitherto witnessed. I say advisedly the signal rather than the cause. For if the Partition in itself had sufficed to rouse spontaneous popular feeling, it would have been unnecessary for the leaders of the agitation to resort in the rural districts to gross misrepresentations of the objects of that measure. What all the smouldering discontent, all the reactionary disaffection centred in Calcutta read into the Partition was a direct attack upon the primacy of the educated classes that had made Calcutta the capital of the Bengalee "nation." The Universities Act of 1904, it was alleged, had been the first attempt on the part of a masterful Viceroy to reduce their influence by curtailing their control of higher education. Partition was a further attempt to hamper their activities by cutting half the "nation" adrift from its "intellectual" capital. This was a cry well calculated to appeal to many "moderates," whom the merely political aspects of the question would have left relatively unmoved and it certainly proved effective, for in Calcutta feeling ran very strong. Whilst "monster" demonstrations were organized in Calcutta and in the principal towns of the _mofussil_, the wildest reports were sedulously disseminated amongst the rural population. Partition was meant to pave the way for undoing the Permanent Settlement which governs the Land Revenue in Bengal, and, once the Permanent Settlement out of the way, Government would screw up the land tax. As for the creation of the new province, it was intended to facilitate the compulsory emigration of the people from the plains, who would be driven