A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from agitation against the Partition of Bengal, procured by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon's departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial, and he determined to maintain the Partition. He was entirely new to Indian affairs, and his _Recollections_ show him to have been often sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official advisers at home and in India. He felt, however, on the whole fairly confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate measure of reforms which would satisfy India's political aspirations and by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration of which "sympathy" was in future to be the key-note rather than mere efficiency. But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position. He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion. But the Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as necessary as reform. The Secretary of State agreed reluctantly to sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared this view and lent willing assistance. But the interchange of opinions between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious. A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in "political satisfaction of the claims of important classes representing ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule." But not till the following month, _i.e._ three years after Mr. Morley had taken over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.