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of progress will not be arrested; and the time will come when perhaps our descendants will wonder what possessed their revered ancestors to perpetuate a custom so cruel and unjust to the womanhood of their race. The future is closed to us; but the past is an open book, and the past tells us that in the great seat of orthodoxy, while Raghunandan was unfolding his marvellous system of Hindu Law and jurisprudence, there rose almost contempo- raneously with him the greatest reformer that Bengal, or India, has ever produced, the prophet of Love (Bhakti), Lord Chaitanya, who would have no distinction between man and man, or between man and woman, who treated the Brahmin, the Chandal and the Moslem alike, and enfranchised our women from the bonds of enforced widowhood. Who knows that in the years to come, in the whirligig of time, there may not arise a second Chaitanya, the Saviour of the Hindu widow, in those great centres of Sanskrit learning where the academic air stirs contemplation and carries the mind forward to brighter visions of future happiness?

I fear I have been somewhat anticipating coming events, but they were so linked with what I was describing that the transition from the present to the future was natural. In the year 1886, the Indian National Congress met for the first time in Calcutta, and great was the popular enthusiasm. All parties combined to welcome the delegates who came from different parts of India. We of the Indian Association and belonging to the middle class were all Congressmen; but what was remarkable was that the British Indian Association, representing the landed interest, and what I may call the conservative conscience of the community, threw themselves heart and soul into the matter. Such enthusiasm this venerable body had never before, and have never since, displayed for the Congress cause. The illustrious Raja Rajendralal Mitter, more a scholar than a politician, was elected Chairman of the Reception Committee, and Babu Joy Kissen Mookerjee, the Nestor of the Bengal zemindars, then in his seventy-ninth year, proposed the election of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji as President of the Congress. It was altogether a Congress of old men, and it brought out in striking relief the great fact that young and old, the middle class as well as the landed aristocracy, indeed all sections of the Indian community, were united on the Congress platform.

Raja Rajendralal Mitter, Kristo Das Pal, Raja Degumbar Mitter, and Maharaja Jotindra Mohon Tagore formed what I may call the political group of the British Indian Association. Kristo Das Pal