The belief that petitions for the redress of grievances, whether presented to the Indian Government or to the British people, are equally vain, is not so serious a matter for us as the distrust of our justice, but it contributed very strongly to the new spirit in its extreme form. Our disregard of all the public protests against the Partition of Bengal and all the persistent appeals for its withdrawal; our disregard of the reasonable pleading of such men as Mr. Gokhale and Dr. Rash Behari Ghose in the Viceroy’s Council, have perhaps done more than anything else to discredit the methods of the old Congress. I do not mean that the Congress has been useless. It served as a training ground for political knowledge. It afforded a centre for the growing unity of India, and without it the leaders of Indian reform could hardly have formulated their own programme. But in two avowed objects it has failed; it has had no influence upon the action of the Indian Government, and no influence upon English opinion at home. For twenty-two years it was a model of order and constitutional propriety. It passed excellent resolutions, it demanded the redress of acknowledged grievances, in trustful loyalty it arranged deputations to the representatives of the Crown. By the Anglo-Indians its constitutional propriety was called cowardice, its resolutions remained unnoticed, its grievances unredressed, and the representative of the Crown refused to receive its deputation. In England, outside the half-dozen who take some interest in India, no one knew where the Congress met, what language it spoke, what were its demands, or what its object; no one knew, and no one cared. The new spirit perceived that it was useless addressing pious resolutions to the official waste-paper basket. The cry of “self-reliance, not mendicancy” spread through the country. One last effort to attract British attention to the grievance of India was made by the Swadeshi movement and the boycott on British goods. “Touch the pockets of our rulers, and they will listen”—that was the hope. And the hope was partly realized, for owing to Swadeshi and the local disturbances in Eastern Bengal, Calcutta, and the Punjab, England during 1907 and 1908 has probably paid more attention to India than at any time since the Mutiny.