When I was passing through Poona in the year 1879, I was called upon by seven leading members of the native community who knew of the interest I had taken in Indian affairs, and in the course of our conversation they made some remarks on the desire of the educated natives for some share of political power. I then explained to them that, as it was clear that India was entirely unfit for representative institutions, the only result would be that power would be transferred from a limited class of Englishmen to a very limited class of natives, which would be of no advantage to the country whatever. My remarks were followed by a dead silence which was broken by one of them saying, in a desponding tone, "you have educated us, and you have made us discontented accordingly," thus illustrating very forcibly what I suppose Solomon meant when he said, "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." But, however that may be, the utterance of the native in question explains the origin of the Indian Congress which was started in 1885 by a small number of the educated classes who began to climb the political tree with considerable vigour, illustrating as they did so the native proverb which tells us that "The higher the monkey climbs the more he shows his tail." And, in fact, the members of the Congress showed theirs so completely when they climbed to the top of their political tree at Madras in 1887, that their proceedings would be hardly worth noticing were it not that they might be the means of prejudicing the proper claims of the natives to consultative assemblies like the one we have in Mysore. With people less advanced as regards common sense than the natives of India, and also less suspicious of the educated classes, the Congress wallahs, as they are sometimes called, might have done some mischief, but the only harm they have really done, and I consider it no small harm, is to lower the educated natives in general in the ideas of those who have not had an opportunity of knowing the best of them, and so appreciating their admirable abilities and calm common sense. For when the public knows, as all those who have paid any attention to the subject do know, that the members of the Congress are now selling pamphlets which are intended to bring the Queen's Government into hatred and contempt, its opinion of the educated natives of India is not likely to be a high one. And in order to make quite sure that the Congress is still selling the pamphlets in question, I suggested to the secretary of the Athenæum in June, 1892, to purchase for the library of that club (and he accordingly did so), from the Indian Congress office in London, a copy of the Congress proceedings with which the pamphlets in question are bound up. And it may not be uninteresting to note here that Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, M.P., as a leading member of the Congress, is therefore one of the sellers of the pamphlets. It is, however, only fair to add, as an excuse for Mr.