Owing to these pleasant qualities, so attractive to Englishmen sprung like myself from the public-school, country-house, and villa classes, I have almost invariably found English officers and officials on the side of the Mohammedans where there is any rivalry of race or religion at all. And in Eastern Bengal this national inclination is now encouraged by the Government’s open resolve to retain the Mohammedan support of the Partition by any means in its power. It was against the Hindus only that all the petty persecution of officialdom was directed. It was they who were excluded from Government posts; it was Hindu schools from which Government patronage was withdrawn. When Mohammedans rioted, the punitive police ransacked Hindu houses, and companies of little Gurkhas were quartered on Hindu populations. It was the Hindus who in one place were forbidden to sit on the river bank. Of course, the plea was that only the Hindus were opposed to the Government’s policy of dividing them from the rest of their race, so that they alone needed suppression. And certainly, after what I had seen in the previous four or five years in Macedonia, Central Africa, Russia, and the Caucasus, this kind of persecution might well appear ludicrously small. But it was the beginning of a dangerous road, to which one could not see the end, and the knowledge that our own country was taking that road aggravated the sense of wrong. It was the same with espionage. Personally I enjoyed being followed by spies wherever I went. I enjoyed it much more than the spies themselves. It was a pleasure to watch the open-hearted stupidity which never left me in doubt as to their purpose, or to look them tranquilly in the face and see their eyes drop in honourable shame. It was a joyful moment when at Serajganj I turned in wrath upon a man who had been following me all day long in the melodramatic disguise of a black shawl and an umbrella, and watched the poor hired worm grovel away, murmuring tearful appeals about superior orders. In that case I was angry because I was visiting the schools—the same over which Sir Bampfylde Fuller resigned—and it seemed to me unfit that the schoolboys should see our Government’s habit of espionage thus illustrated before their faces. But at another place where I arrived in the cold of half-past three in the morning, and found that the telegram to prepare for my arrival had been detained, there was no alloy in the pleasure with which I seized upon the spy detailed to dog me, and compelled him to procure a cart, conduct me to the house where he knew I ought to have been expected, and knock up the sleeping servants to receive me.