Month after month they must have seen its audacity grow in direct proportion to official apathy.

They must have seen a reign of lawlessness and intimidation spread steadily over a great part of the Metropolitan province.

The failure of the ordinary machinery of justice to check these crying evils was repeatedly brought home to them.

Yet it was not until 1908 that the necessity of exceptional measures to cope with an exceptional situation was tardily and very reluctantly realized.

The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year.