“Having been warned not to say I was only thirty-three, when he put me the straight question, ‘How old are you?’ I unhesitatingly responded, ‘Forty.’ ‘I presume you are a near relative of the Queen of England?’ (asked the President). ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am not.’ But I was fain to add, ‘I am, however, as yet an unmarried man,’ with which unscrupulous suggestion I completely regained the old gentleman’s favour.” The quotation was regarded as apt, but the passage was only a joke, and it must be remembered that Lord Curzon had not claimed that Europeans are universally or even generally truthful. He had called that proposition absurd. The speech itself would probably have been soon forgotten if it had not been connected in the popular mind with the greatest and most disastrous of Lord Curzon’s schemes for promoting his ideal of efficiency—the PARTITION OF BENGAL. It had long been evident that the Province of Bengal, if the large outlying districts of Orissa, Behar, and Chota Nagpur were included, was too large for one administration. It contained close upon 80,000,000 souls. But of this amount Bengal Proper counted for only 43,000,000. The next largest of the districts was Behar, with 21,500,000. Two things were possible and would have been gladly accepted—either to form a new province out of the western districts of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, with a capital at Patna or Ranchi, relieving Bengal of a population of about 33,000,000; or to have elevated Bengal into a Governorship on the same standing as Bombay and Madras, under a Governor appointed directly from England instead of a Lieut.-Governor appointed out of the Indian Civil Service; and at the same time to have organized the outlying districts as Commissionerships, responsible either to the Crown, or to the Governor of Bengal. Either of these two main schemes would have been accepted without question by the enormous majority of the inhabitants, and the chief principles of the second were favoured by Mr. Brodrick (Lord Midleton), at that time Secretary of State for India. Lord Curzon, however, was determined to cut Bengal Proper and the Bengali-speaking community in two, giving 25,000,000 of the population to the new Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with a new capital at Dacca, and 18,000,000 of the population to a Province still to be called Bengal, with the old capital of Calcutta, and bound up with the outlying districts of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, all of which differ from Bengal in race, language, and civilization, as does Assam. Under this division, the populations of the two new Provinces are approximately 54,000,000 in Bengal, and 31,000,000 in Eastern Bengal and Assam.[5]