The Partition led to Swadeshi. Of course, there was nothing new in an attempt to encourage Indian industries. For thirty years past the true friends of India, like Sir William Wedderburn, had been insisting that the solution of her economic miseries lay partly in diverting some portion of her agricultural population to the industrial work for which she used to be celebrated till England stamped on her manufactures and determined to use her only as a farm for raw material and a market for Lancashire. Artistic people had also attempted to realize the same object, for it did not require a politician’s eye to perceive the immense superiority of Indian fabrics in point of beauty. But the true Swadeshi movement dates from the year of the Partition. I believe it was first suggested by Mr. Krishna Kumar Mitra in his paper _Sanjibani_, when he declared that India’s one sure means of drawing England’s attention to the Partition and other wrongs was the boycott of British goods. The movement, however, did not become public till a great meeting held in Calcutta Town Hall on August 7, 1905, to protest against the Partition. A form of oath was then drawn up by Mr. Surendra Nath Banerjea, Principal of Ripon College, Editor of the _Bengali_, and probably the most prominent leader of the Congress party in Bengal, and the oath ran as follows:— “I hereby pledge myself to abstain from the purchase of all English-made goods for at least a year from this date. So help me God.” Thus a movement which had been entirely economic for some twenty years suddenly became political, and the boycott was added to Swadeshi. The growth of the new phase was rapid. It spread like a gospel through both provinces of Bengal. Within a few months the reports of our Commissioners were full of it. “The Swadeshi movement has contributed largely to the development of the cotton cloth industry in all the districts of this division,” writes the Commissioner of Burdwan in Western Bengal (1906-7), “except Bankura, where the inclination of the people to use country-made things is not pronounced and consequently the sale of Manchester goods has not much decreased.” In the _Indian Trade Journal_ (July 25, 1907), published by the Government, the Magistrate of Hooghly is quoted:— “It appears that while formerly the weavers had to take advances from the middlemen, they are now very much better off, and, if anything, the middlemen are sometimes indebted to them.... There cannot be any doubt that, on account of the Swadeshi movement, the weavers as a class, who are a stay-at-home people, have distinctly advanced. Fly-shuttle looms arc being largely used, and the people are said to appreciate them.” In the Report on the Land Revenue Administration of the Lower Provinces (1906-7) we read—