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years some of the qualities of youth, The late Mr. Philip Smith of the Oxford Mission asked me, when he went to see me in jail in 1883, whether I could explain to him the secret of my great influence over the student community. My reply was prompt and decisive, J said, ‘I love the students. I rejoice with them in their joys, I grieve with them in their sorrows, and they reciprocate the sentiment with the generous enthusiasm of youth.’
I regarded my vocation as a sacred calling. My duties were indeed multitudinous,: but to those of the class-room I accorded a special preference. I never came to the lecture-room without being thoroughly prepared for my work. Sometimes such was the inspiration of the lecture-room that a difficult point that had evaded my efforts in my own private study became luminously clear under the influence of my environment. Thus there is the play of a living magnetism between the teacher and the taught, and all teachers who have taken a real interest in their work must have felt it. I always set a high value upon my educational work and put it in the forefront of my activities. It may not be out of place to reproduce some remarks that I made in this connexion in one of my speeches:
‘Political work is more or less ephemeral, though none the less highly useful. Educational work has in it the elements of permanent utility. The empire of the teacher is an ever-enduring empire, which extends over the future. The teachers are the masters of future. I cannot think of a nobler calling than theirs. Theirs is a heaven-appointed task, a sacred vocation. But how few realize their responsibilities or rise to the height of their mission! If the work of the present is to be perpetuated, it must be through those who are to be the citizens of the future. “Suffer little children to come unto me”, said the great Founder of Christianity. Jesus Christ appealed not to the callous and the hard-hearted, but to the soft, the gentle, the impressionable, whose souls had not been hardened by the rough buffetings of life.’
In my mind my educational and my political work were indeed interlinked. I felt that the political advancement of the country must depend upon the creation among our young men of a genuine, sober and rational interest in public affairs. The beginnings of public life must be implanted in them. They must have their period of apprenticeship and qualify themselves for their civic duties. They must, on the one hand, be stirred out of their indifference to politics, which was the prevailing attitude of the student-mind in Bengal in 1875, and on the other, protected against extreme fanatical views,