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was their leader; but Rajendralal Mitter was the literary genius of the group. Degumbar Mitter and Kristo Das Pal were now dead, and the leadership of the political wing devolved upon Raja Rajendralal. Young as I was, I enjoyed the confidence and even the friendship of every member of this brilliant coterie. I knew them well and knew them in all their strength and perhaps in all their weakness. Raja Rajendralal Mitter was a good speaker and an effective writer. He was pre-eminently a scholar and a literary man, but he had likewise a great grasp of public questions and was undoubtedly one of the foremost public men of his generation. I cften heard him speak. His style was simple, conversational, with a touch of humour in it. In his later life, he was somewhat hard of hearing. In the debates at the Corporation meetings, he used to sit next to Kristo Das Pal, who supplied him with brief notes of the speeches, and thus enabled him to take part in the discussions. To the last he retained his interest in public affairs and continued to enjoy the esteem and regard of the community. The practice of throwing overboard cur veterans, of calling them men of yesterday, had not yet begun. The traditional veneration for the services of a past generation still had a firm hold on the public mind.

At the Calcutta Congress, and in all future Congresses until the bcon was obtained, I moved the Resolution on the Reform and Enlargement of the Councils. To me it was a topic of absorbing interest. I could hardly think of anything else. Call it weakness, or call it strength, call it by what name you please (and I trust I shall be excused for this self-revelation) I have through life been under the periodical domination of a single overmastering ideal. It was the Civil Service question, or Local Self-government, or the expansion of the Councils, or Swadeshi, with which was linked up the modification of the Partition, that filled the whole of my mental horizon, fired my enthusiasm, and absorbed my soul. For the time being I lived in my ideal. In all other spheres, my movements were more or less mechanical. I persuaded myself that it was the one thing to be achieved, priceless above all others, and I had no diffi- culty in persuading others. It took a little time for me to warm up. But when the process was accomplished I was proof against all dissuasion, I lived in a world of my own, an atmosphere of my creation, impervious to external influences. So when, during the anti-Partition controversy, it was again and again dinned into the ears of the people of Bengal that the Partition was a settled fact and could not be unsettled, and when all appearances pointed to