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good and true and patriotic, they in their turn imbued me with their juvenescence, their youthful ardour and their radiant outlook on life. I always returned from the class-room with an added stock of youthful qualities, which, controlled and regulated by my contact with affairs, was a superb asset in the daily struggle of life.
Frederick the Great would not appoint a schoolmaster to any administrative post, and a Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, as the great Vidyasagar once told me, followed the same rule. But a schoolmaster, in living touch with affairs, ought to possess the qualities that are most valuable in life. More than one President of the United States had been a school master. I can scarcely exaggerate the benefit I derived from close association with the young for a period of nearly forty years. As President of the College Council, I am in touch with the administration of the college, though I have ceased to be a teacher. My interest in the college and in the cause of education will only cease when I have ceased to take an interest in all mundane affairs.
For five years I was a member of the Senate. I owed my seat not to nomination by Government, but to the votes of my fellow- graduates. The new Universities Act had given to registered graduates the right of returning five members to the Senate, who should be graduates of not less than ten years' standing. I stood as a candidate and was returned at the head of the poll.
Before the enactment of the new Universities Act a modified sort of election was allowed, but it was only M.A.'s and B.A.'s who had graduated in or before 1867 who could stand as candidates for election. Why the year 1867 was fixed, why no one who had graduated in or after that year could stand as a candidate, is one of those riddles that the official sphinx has not chosen to solve, and which at the time evoked considerable comment and criticism. The graduates of 1868 were under no special ban. They could not by any means be considered an inferior set as compared with the graduates of previous years. Why then were they excluded from standing for the election? If the rule had been that only graduates of twenty or even twenty-five years could be eligible, there would be some sense in it as having in view the return of only experi- enced graduates. But such a rule, my friends said, would not have served the purpose of its framers; for their view was that the rule was especially framed to exclude me, the year of my graduation being 1868.
So unreasonable was the restriction that a public meeting was