menal. A humorous story is told illustrative of this ignorance. It was the day following the death of Lord Northbrook. Two Englishmen were travelling in a railway carriage. " One of them, looking through the news columns of the paper in his hand, quietly asked * Who is this Lord Northbrook that snipped off yesterday ?' ' Who knows ? * said his equally indifferent companion " May be some relation of Lord Cromer '/* It was to counter-act the evil effects of such abysmal ignorance of Englishmen even about persons sent out to India as Viceroys, that the British Congress Commit- tee was started in 1889 and the newspaper India in 1890. As long as the Congress was a united body controlled by Moderate leaders with whom the Congress Committee was in general agreement, there was no difficulty. But now came a change . The Moderates had seceded from the Congress; and the Congress Committee and its weekly organ were still the monopoly of the British friends of the Moderates ; the result was that though the Congress supported the journal and spent nearly Rs. 30,000 annually on the work of the Committee, the policy of India was antagonistic to that of the Congress. Mr. Polak whose evident leanings towards the Moderates, ill fitted him for his editorial work under the changed circumstances, had not, Mr. Tilak was astonished to find, cared to publish even the Resolutions of the Special Congress (1918).
Mr. Tilak, though the chosen President of the Delhi Congress, was not the bearer of any mandate from the Congress. So he found it very difficult to carry on his work with the Congress Committee and India. The reactionary element in the Committee assumed a lofty
