The problem is that this liberalism was practised within severe limits. The Indian National Congress was established in 1885 as a voice of moderate, constitutionalist Indian opinion by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, and a group of well-educated, establishmentarian Indians. Far from welcoming such a development, as a truly liberal regime seeking to instil democracy in its charges ought to have done, the British reacted to it with varying degrees of hostility and contempt.
