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greatly added to the discomforts of the railway journey. I was accompanied by Babu Govind Churn Das, a dear friend now, alas! dead, who was practising as a pleader in the High Court and was also associated with the teaching staff in the Ripon Collegiate School.

We visited Lahore, Amritsar, Multan, Rawalpindi, Ambala, Delhi, Agra, Aligarh, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore. The heat of Multan is a recollection that haunts me still. We started with a cry, but the central idea was the promotion of unification between the different Indian peoples and provinces, and of a feeling of friendliness between the people of Bengal and the martial races of the North. We counted for nothing in those days. It was constantly dinned into our ears that our political demands, whatever they were, came from the people of the deltaic Ganges, who did not contribute a single soldier to the army, and who were separated from the sturdier races of the North by a wide gulf of isolation, if not of alienation. We wanted to dissipate this myth. To-day it stands exploded by the creation of the Congress and the long train of united and patriotic endeavours which have marked the solidarity of the life of modern India.

Our cry on this occasion was the same as that which a decade ago had united all India. The prayer of united India on the Civil Service question had not yet been granted. The maximum limit of age for the open competitive examination had not yet been raised, though a slight and doubtful concession had been made by the creation of the Statutory Civil Service. The prayer was now repeated at the public meetings held in the great towns of Northern India, from Allahabad and Cawnpore to Rawalpindi and Multan. Coupled with this appeal to the Government, there was an appeal to ourselves, namely, that we should help to create a national fund, such as had been started in Bengal, to promote our political work. It was not long before our agitation bore fruit. Soon came the response from the Government. A unanimous despatch was addressed to the Secretary of State by the Government of India, recommending the raising of the limit of age for the Indian Civil Service. A Public Services Commission was appointed the following year, and as the result of its recommendations the age for the Indian Civil Service was raised to the present limit.

The year 1884 witnessed the departure of Lord Ripon from India, and it was the occasion of popular demonstrations unparal- leled in Indian annals. The Anglo-Indian official living in isolation