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Here is the crack man of the Indians, and Government has to expel him before he has been three years in the service!"

'How far this widespread feeling had any share in bringing about the monstrous sentence passed upon poor Surendra we cannot say, but certainly it did prevent any fair hearing for his appeals for justice and mercy. He protested and appealed, as did thousands of his countrymen for him, but all in vain.'

And then Mr. Hume proceeds to contrast my treatment with that of a European Civilian who had been guilty of a much graver offence:

'What to those of us who were impartial in the matter seemed to cast a very lurid light on the transaction was this. Not long after the events ahove referred to, an English Covenanted Civilian was found guilty, by the officers appointed to investigate his case, of offences far more grave—involving pecuniary vagaries unparalleled in the modern history of the Service—than any that even his judges thought to be established against Mr. Surendra Nath. Was this officer dismissed the Service? No, he was compelled to refund a sum of money belonging to Government that had somehow found its way into his private accounts, and he was suspended for a period of twelve or fifteen months, thereby suffering a considerable loss of salary for the time, but almost immediately on the expiration of the period of suspension, he, being a relative of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, was jobbed into the favourite, and one of the highest paid, appointments in the province, an appointment to which, even had there been nothing against him, he would not have been entitled either by stan- ding in the Service or ability.

'The establishment of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress has rendered the unpunished perpetration of any similarly atro- cious job at the present time almost impossible, but it illustrates the very different modes in which Indians and Europeans have been systematically dealt with by the Indian officials; and the fates of these two officials are thoroughly characteristic examples of the spirit which has for the last quarter of a century pervaded the majority of the bureaucracy.'

Mr. Hume thus concludes his article:

'In the meantime how fared it with Surendra Nath? Crushed, utterly. disgraced, and almost a pauper (for nearly all his means had been ex- pended on his visit to England and his education there) had he com- mitted suicide in despair, who could have marvelled? But, like the brave man and dear good fellow that he is, he set himself to the nobler task of fighting out the battle to the last, and living down the injustice that thus clouded his early years, and disproving by his life the mistaken estimate that had been formed of his character.