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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.
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.
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.
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.
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