It was Mr.W.O.Bonnerjee, an able Bengalee lawyer of moderate and enlightened views, who presided over the first Indian National Congress at Bombay and delivered an opening address of which the moderation has rarely been emulated, and though the Congress movement originated in Bombay rather than in Bengal, the fluent spokesmen of Bengal very soon had the satisfaction of feeling that for the first time in Indian history Bengal might claim to be marching in the van.
Owing to his greater plasticity and imagination, the Bengalee has certainly often assimilated English ideas as few other Indians have.
None can question, for instance, the genuine Western culture and sound learning of men like Dr.Ashutosh Mookerjee, the Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, or Dr.Rash Behari Ghose, than whom the English Bar itself has produced few greater lawyers; and it would be easy to quote many other names of scarcely less distinction amongst the many highly educated Bengalees who have served and are still serving the State with undoubted loyalty and ability.

With the spread of English education, habits of tolerance have grown up, at any rate as to externals; and though on the crucial point of inter-marriage caste law has lost hardly anything of its rigidity, religion, in the ordinary intercourse of life, seems to sit almost as lightly upon educated Hindu society in Calcutta as upon English society in London.

Another result of English education, combined with the absence of such traditions of Brahman supremacy as are still recent and powerful in the Deccan, has been to invest the political aspirations of the Bengalees with that democratic tinge which has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience.
Of any real democratic spirit amongst the educated classes of Bengal it is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only a few of the most enlightened amongst them have so far even recognized the necessity of making some attempt to bridge if they wish to give the slightest plausibility to their professions.

It would be less far-fetched, though the analogy would still be very halting, to compare the position of the Bengalee "moderates" with that of the middle classes in England before the Reform Bill of 1832, who had no idea of emancipating the masses, but only of emancipating themselves to some extent from the control of a close oligarchy.

From this point of view there are undoubtedly, and especially amongst the elder generation, many educated Bengalees who are convinced that in claiming by political agitation a larger share in the administration and government of the country they are merely carrying into practice the blameless theories of civic life and political activity which their reading of English history has taught them.