For if the Partition in itself had sufficed to rouse spontaneous popular feeling, it would have been unnecessary for the leaders of the agitation to resort in the rural districts to gross misrepresentations of the objects of that measure.

What all the smouldering discontent, all the reactionary disaffection centred in Calcutta read into the Partition was a direct attack upon the primacy of the educated classes that had made Calcutta the capital of the Bengalee "nation." The Universities Act of 1904, it was alleged, had been the first attempt on the part of a masterful Viceroy to reduce their influence by curtailing their control of higher education.

Partition was a further attempt to hamper their activities by cutting half the "nation" adrift from its "intellectual" capital.

This was a cry well calculated to appeal to many "moderates," whom the merely political aspects of the question would have left relatively unmoved and it certainly proved effective, for in Calcutta feeling ran very strong.

Whilst "monster" demonstrations were organized in Calcutta and in the principal towns of the _mofussil_, the wildest reports were sedulously disseminated amongst the rural population.
Partition was meant to pave the way for undoing the Permanent Settlement which governs the Land Revenue in Bengal, and, once the Permanent Settlement out of the way, Government would screw up the land tax.