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town to town urging my countrymen of the better classes to enlist as soldiers and fight for the Empire, which was in danger. I address- ed more than thirty meetings in different parts of the province. The keynote of my address was that self-government, which was the goal of our political aspirations, connoted self-defence, and that, if we sought the privileges of Imperial citizenship, we must bear its burdens and responsibilities. and the foremost among them was to fight for the defence of the Empire. The appeal went home, and in not one of the numerous meetings that were held was there a single dissentient voice heard. Non-Co-operation had not yet reared its head; and there was not the faintest trace of those deve- lopments in the political situation that now attract so large a measure of public attention.

To me, these recruitment meetings were a novel experience. I found myself for the first time in my public life standing side by side, and on the same platform, with high Government officials, pleading for a common cause, and receiving from them the courtesy for which I was hardly prepared. We were able to raise something over six thousand recruits, mostly from among the respectable classes in Bengal. The quality of the recruits, it is said, did not always come up to the mark; but it has to be borne in mind that this was altogether a novel experiment, and that for a hundred and fifty years Bengal had been a stranger to the art and the practice of soldiering. It is within my personal knowledge that many of the young men showed great enthusiasm, and that in some cases they defied even the sanctity of parental authority in order to satisfy their soldierly aspirations. Bengal is after all not such an unpromis- ing field for recruitment, if one goes about it the right way. It is therefore with a sense of keen regret and disappointment that one notices the poor response that Bengal has made to the call for enlistment in the Territorial Army. It was a movement in which the leaders of Indian public opinion, including those of Bengal, took a keen interest. I claim to have had a hand in expediting through the Legislative Council the Act creating the Indian Terri- torial Army. The failure in Bengal is largely due to the spirit that Non-Co-operation has evoked among the classes from whom the Territorial force is to be recruited. With the subsidence of Non-Co- operation I expect better days for the movement.

Indeed, within the last few months, a great change has taken place in the political situation. The cult of Non-Co-operation, which dominated the political horizon, to-day stands suspended. Its