ABSTRACT
“No Indian,” said Mr. Gokhale in London in 1913, “could have started the Indian National Congress. Apart from the fact that anyone putting his hand to such a gigantic task had need to have Mr. Hume’s commanding personality, even if an Indian had possessed such a personality and had come forward to start such a movement, embracing all India, the officials would not have allowed it to come into existence. If the founder of the Congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other of suppressing the movement.” 1
