But I think that year marked a change. So far, beyond attending the Congress and publishing two vernacular pamphlets on Mazzini and Garibaldi—dangerous themes, I admit, for a member of any subject race—his action had not been political. In that year he went to England, like Mr. Gokhale, to represent the cause of Indian reform, and he also visited America. It so happened that he found England on the verge of the greatest Liberal revival. She appeared to have awakened from the ten years’ incubus of reaction and Imperialistic misgovernment. Hopes of reform went hand in hand with hatred of oppression. He noticed the movements of the unemployed, the devotion of passive resisters, the sympathies with oppressed nationalities, the rapid recovery from the fever of the Boer war. He noticed that even on such a question as bringing the trams across the bridges the Lords were threatened with a revolution in the ordering of the State.[64] The same spirit of freedom appeared to be at work in other parts of the world—in Ireland, Japan, Egypt, Persia, and especially in Russia. It was natural that the ideal of winning for his own people a true share in the government of their country should be strengthened. Unhappily, Lajpat Rai also observed in England that the people were too much occupied with the overwhelming problems confronting themselves to pay close attention to a subject so distant and abstruse as Indian reform. He observed that in English politics the cause of justice had no chance unless it were made a party question, and the Liberal Party refused to make Indian reform a party question, because, while it did not move the people at large, it touched too many important interests. As to the upper classes, he found, as Ruskin had found long before, that “every mutiny, every danger, every crime occurring under our Indian legislation arose directly out of our native desire to live on the loot of India.” Only from the Irish and Labour Parties did his mission receive any real encouragement, and, owing to the executive weakness of those two parties, he concluded—one may still hope too hastily—that any appeal to the justice and benevolence of Great Britain as represented by her Parliament was vain:—