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The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their passionate protest against the Partition.
Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, a leading Parsee of Bombay, who had been drawn into co-operation with the Congress under the influence of the political Liberalism which he had heard expounded in England by Gladstone and Bright, played at this critical period an important part which deserves recognition. He was as eloquent as any Bengalee, and he possessed in a high degree the art of managing men.
HIS Honor, Syed Mehta, the District Judge of Golampore, had dined with the Malcolms, and he was the first of the Collector's guests to leave the bungalow. He sauntered down the drive, lifting his contemplative gaze to the magnificence of the starry heavens. Behind him, the lamp-lit rooms sent long thrusts of light, sword-wise, into the hot darkness.
Many of them such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta, a rising member of the great Parsee community in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly India's claim to self-government within the British Empire had spent several years in England.
The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and, though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty, the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the reforms in local and municipal institutions which, with the repeal of the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord Ripon's "Pro-Indian" Viceroyalty; for it fulfilled many of the demands which Indian Liberals, and notably Pherozeshah Mehta, had urged for years past for a more effective share in municipal administration.
A few months later, in November, the veteran Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who had fought stoutly ever since Surat against any Congress reunion, in which he clearly foresaw that the Moderates would be the dupes of the Extremists, passed away in his seventy-first year, but not before he had sent a message, worded in his old peremptory style, to Sir Satyendra Sinha, daring him to refuse the chairmanship of the coming session which was to be held in December in Bombay.
The fact, however, is that the results are not all proportionate to the time we give to our education. We have not reacted on the masses. But I must not anticipate Dr. Mehta. He is in earnest. He writes feelingly. He has examined the pros and cons and collected a mass of evidence in support of his arguments. The latest pronouncement on the subject is that of the Viceroy.
Even such broad-minded and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political grounds.
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