In Bengal even small boys of so tender an age as still to have the run of zenanas have, I am told, been taught the whole patter of sedition, and go about from house to house dressed up as little _sanyasis_ in little yellow robes preaching hatred of the English.
The question is, can we extricate the better elements from this tangle of passion and prejudice?
There are many foul spots in the Hindu revival in Bengal, apart even from tendencies which we cannot but regard as politically criminal.

At the same time there runs through it a strain of idealism which probably constitutes its real force, and also our danger.
For strangely emotional and often a creature of his senses, the Bengalee is accessible to spiritual influences with which the worldly-ambitious Brahmanism of the Deccan, for instance, is rarely informed.

He is always apt to rush to extremes, and just as amongst the best representatives of the educated classes there was in the last century a revolt against the Hindu social and religious creed of their ancestors which tended first towards Christianity or at least the ethics of Christianity and then towards Western agnosticism, so the present revolt may be regarded in some of its aspects as a reaction against these earlier tendencies; and in spite of its extreme violence it may not be any more permanent.

The problem is still full of unknown quantities; but the known quantities are at any rate sufficient to make us appreciate its gravity..