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Brilliant, fascinating, with an extraordinary command of the finest vocabulary, he was one of the best debaters that I have seen. The Indian Civil Service, so far as I know, has not yet produced his like in this respect. In his college days, he was, I understand, President of the Oxford Union. As Chairman of the Corporation, and president of its meetings, he had the last word in every dis- cussion; and it was difficult to obtain a vote against him. So we hit upon the device of altering the rules and giving the last word to the mover of the resolution. But, in the discussion of this resolution, he had under the existing rules the last word, and we were defeated. His supremacy remained unchallenged; but it was a supremacy that was exercised with the cordial, and at times the admiring, support of his colleagues.
When the Corporation of Calcutta was threatened by a clique, at the head of which was a High Court Judge who dabbled in sanitation, Sir Henry Harrison boldly stood out for the Corporation and fought the Government with a courage and fearlessness of consequences that extorted the admiration of friends and foes alike. In the darkest days of the Ilbert Bill controversy, when the atmos- phere was electric and racial feeling ran high, Sir Henry Harrison and Mr. Cotton got up a dinner in their house in Kyd Street, to which they invited the leading Indian and European gentlemen, and Mr. Cotton made a speech breathing the spirit of equality as between Europeans and Indians. In 1885, when after the Panjdch incident we started a movement for the enlistment of Bengalees as volunteers, Sir Henry Harrison wrote a pamphlet, strongly sup- porting it (though he knew that the Government was against it), and urging that the legitimate aspirations of the educated community should be gratified. Of the educated Indians, he spoke as follows:
'Agents, guides, instructors, and purveyors of information to the Indian nation as the educated natives already are, very little reflection ought to satisfy us that the India of the future will infallibly think and act as that section of the community, in whose hands are their schools, their presses, their courts and their public offices, may instruct them. It is clearly destined to be the voice of India and the brain of India, the masses will be its hands and will reflect its teaching. In dealing with young India, therefore, as it is sometimes called, it is the gravest mistake to suppose that we are politically (as we are obviously militarily) dealing with an insignificant section of the community; the sentiments which are now
fermenting in the minds of two hundred thousand persons will flow out,