aspiration, and an _intelligensia_ had grown up hungry for political
rights and powers. Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised
bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer little
leisure for that close touch with the people which in the past meant
confidence and goodwill. Political restlessness had already for some
years begun to manifest itself in anarchical conspiracies and crimes of
violence, when the Great War began. In India, as elsewhere, the reflex
action of the war was a disturbing element. High prices, stifled trade,
high taxation, nationalist longings and ideas of self-determination and
self-government served to reinforce subterranean agitation.

But throughout the war India not only remained calm and restrained, but
her actual contribution to the war, in men and material, was colossal
and was ungrudgingly given. She had a right to expect in return generous
treatment; but what did she get? She got the Rowlatt Bill. Now, of
course, there was a great deal of wicked, lying nonsense talked by
agitators about the provisions of the Rowlatt Bill, and the people were
grossly misled. But the plain fact remains that when India had emerged
from the trying ordeal of the war, not only with honour untarnished, but
having placed us under a great obligation, our first practical return
was to pass a repressive measure, for fear, forsooth, that if it was not
passed then it might be pigeon-holed and forgotten. India asked for
bread and we gave her a stone--a stupid, blundering act, openly
deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India. What
was the result? The Punjab disturbances and the preventive massacre of
the Jallianwala Bagh. I do not propose to dwell on this deplorable and
sadly mishandled matter, save to say that so far from cowing agitation,
it has left a legacy of hate that it will take years to wipe out; and
that the subsequent action of a number of ill-informed persons in
raising a very large sum of money for the officer responsible for that