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deliver. The physical effort was great, seeing that I had to address an audience of over five thousand people. I followed my usual practice and spoke without notes.

The Coronation Durbar was to take place within a few days of the meeting of the Congress. Educated India had protested against this expensive show; but all in vain. I echoed in my speech the sense of my educated countrymen, but, as the Durbar was bound to be held, I urged that, like the previous Durbars of 1858, 1877 and 1887, it should be commemorated by a suitable boon. The Durbar was held, but no boon was announced. The memory of it lingers, if at all, in the flashy rhetoric of the hour, and in the wasteful expenditure, which might have been avoided.

The most important topic of the day, which necessarily found a large place in the presidential speech, was the question of University Education. I had been an educationist all my life, and I naturally felt a deep interest in the educational problem. Of the many disservices which Lord Curzon had done to India, his so- called reform of the universities was the most far-reaching in its consequences. Under the plea of efficiency he had officialized the Calcutta Municipality; under the same plea he now proceeded to officialize the universities, and to bring the entire system of higher education under the control of Government. Efficiency was his watchword; popular sentiment counted for nothing, and in his mad worship of this fetish Lord Curzon set popular opinion at open defiance.

In 1901 Lord Curzon held an Educational Conference at Simla, to which only European educationists were invited. It was a secret conclave, its proceedings have not yet been published, and yet at this very conference Lord Curzon declared, 'Concealment has been no part of my policy since I have been in India, and the education of the people is assuredly the last subject to which I should think of applying such a canon'. Never was there a greater divergence between profession and practice. And the effrontery of it lay in the emphatic denunciation of secrecy at the very time, and in connexion with the very subject, in regard to which the speaker had deliberately made up his mind to violate the canon that he had so eloquently proclaimed. But that was Lord Curzon's method, and we Orientals regarded it with a feeling of amusement, as coming from one who had extolled the ethics of the West above the baser morality of the East.

The Educational Conference was followed by the appointment