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it, in comradeship with colleagues, now, alas, dead, and in what I conceived to be the best interests of the country. I had helped to build up the Congress. It was a part of my life work, my pride and .my privilege, and it was not in me to do aught which, in my opinion, would weaken its influence or the position which it occupied in the estimation of the country.

Never was the pressure brought on me to join the Home Rule League greater or more persistant than after Mrs. Besant's intern- ment. I was then a candidate for a seat in the Imperial Legislative Council. A voter, who was a friend, wrote to me that unless I joined the Home Rule League he would not vote for me. I took no notice of the offer or the threat. The Secretary of the Home Rule League wrote to me to say that if I joined the League I should be unanimously elected President of the Calcutta Branch and my election to the Imperial Council would be unopposed. In my public life, I never allowed myself to be daunted by the frowns or seduced by the smiles of power. And even when the dispensation of favour lay in the hands of friends or colleagues I acted on the same principle, and was not to be deterred from my purpose or from fulfilling the behests of my conviction, by threats or by inducements.

Great as is my reverence for Mrs. Besant and my admiration for her public work, my objection to joining the Home Rulc League was not in any way minimized by her internment. But I readily and whole-heartedly associated myself with the public protests against this unfortunate measure. I presided at two protest meetings, one held at the Indian Association rooms and the other at the Town Hall of Calcutta, and as strongly condemned her internment as any Home Rule Leaguer. The internment of Mrs. Besant was the origin of the movement for her election as President of the Congress of 1917. The first visible sign of disunion among the members of the Nationalist party after the Lucknow Congress was, as I have observed, the formation of the Home Rule League and the second was the movement for the election of Mrs. Besant as President of the Congress. The internment of a gifted lady who was serving the motherland with unexampled devotion set the whole country ablaze with excitement. The general feeling was that by her internment the Government sought to aim a deadly blow at the agitation for self-government, which she had so vigorously championed; and the utterances of provincial rulers, which had a wonderful family likeness in their tone of disparagement, if not of ridicule, of our aspirations for self-government, deepened the