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recent in point of time, too absorbing in their character, to permit the consideration of any other matter.

Presently there appeared on the platform Babu Monoranjan Guha, accompanied by his son, Chittaranjan Guha, with a bandage round his forehead, to tell the delegates the story of the assault committed by the police upon this young man. The father, who as a speaker wielded the resources of our language with wonderful power, told the story in his own inimitable style keeping the audience spellbound for the time. Chittaranjan had been attacked by the police with their regulation lathis, and thrown into a tank full of water. The assault was continued, notwithstanding the help- less condition of the boy, who offered no resistance of any kind, but shouted Bande-Mataram with every stroke of the lathi. It was a supreme effort of resignation and submission to brutal force without resistance and without questioning. The spectacle of father and son, standing side by side on the platform, the father relating the story, the son bearing witness to it by the marks of violence on his person, was a sight ever to be remembered; and it was afterwards transferred to canvas and was one of the most popular pictures in the Calcutta Exhibition of 1906, which was opened by Lord Minto.

The Conference broke up in the evening; and as the delegates dis- persed to their homes they shouted the forbidden cry of Bande-Mataram in the streets of Barisal. The police did not interfere. Presumably they thought they had done a sufficient day's work, and left the delegates alone.

But the story of this act of repression, one of the darkest in the annals of the defunct Government of East Bengal, was not yet closed. The Conference met on the following day, and was transact- ing its business in the usual way, when Mr. Kemp, District Superintendent of Police, entered the pandal. He walked up to the platform and told the President that the Conference must disperse, unless he was prepared to give a guarantee that the delegates would not shout Bande-Mataram in the streets after the Conference was over. The President, after consulting the delegates, declined to give the guarantee. Mr. Kemp then read out the order of the magistrate directing the dispersal of the Conference under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code. A wave of indignation passed over the Conference. The delegates were in no mood to submit. 14