His speech on India in 1883 to his constituents shows the broad and systematic way in which he approached the problem. He studied it with the minute care he bestowed on every subject he handled; and in a few years he acquired by his work an amount of popularity among natives such as had never before been earned by an Englishman outside India, and by few Anglo-Indians. As this work was mostly done after his Parliamentary struggle was over, the record of it belongs to the story of his closing years; but it was only the consistent sequel to his previous political life. He took up the cause of India as he had done those of Italy, Poland, Ireland, of Boers, Zulus, and Egyptians, with no thought or prospect of personal gain, out of sheer zeal for justice and hatred of oppression. And inasmuch as Anglo-Indians of the school of Mr Rudyard Kipling have consistently derided and denounced his Indian policy, it may be fitting to note at this point the advantage that policy has over such opposition in respect of its relation to universal political principles. The doctrine of Mr Kipling's school--who may be defined as barbaric sentimentalists--is that Asia in general, and India in particular, are absolute exceptions to all the principles of European politics. The East, they say, is unprogressive, unchangeable, unimprovable. The most direct confutation of that doctrine is supplied by the simple fact of the persistence of the Congress movement, which at its outset the sentimentalists scouted as a chimera. Whatever may be its outcome, they are for ever discredited, in that they declared the thing itself, when broached, to be impossible. And those whose sociology goes deeper and wider than a rule-of-thumb acquaintance with part of the actual life of a race or a region are aware that India can no more than any other land resist the laws of social transmutation, given the transmuting forces and conditions. It is extremely unfortunate that many Englishmen are ready to accept as final the sweeping sociological dicta of Mr Kipling, on the score merely of his first-hand knowledge of Indian life and his literary genius. Foolish generalisations on social possibilities have been made in every country in every age by men with first-hand knowledge of their theme; and it must be regretfully said that foolish men of genius are among the most eminent darkeners of counsel on such matters. When Mr Kipling gives a particular account of a particular phase of Indian life, Englishmen who in the terms of the case have no knowledge of that life accept the account as a "revelation," when obviously their estimate of it in that light has no critical value whatever. Strong in the suffrages of such judges, Mr Kipling has been pleased to speak of Bradlaugh as being prepared by defective education to take that mistaken view of Indian life which Mr Kipling inexpensively imputes to all inquiring Englishmen at home. The sufficient answer to that