--_Modern Review, vol. XIX, pages_ 277, 278. THE HISTORY OF A FAILURE THAT WAS GREAT At the invitation of the President and the committee of the Faridpore Industrial Exhibition, Dr. J. C. Bose gave a lecture on the life of his father, the late Babu Bhugwan Chunder Bose, who founded the Exhibition at Faridpore, where he was the sub-divisional officer, 50 years ago. It was published in the Modern Review for February 1917--volume xxi, p. 221. In course of his address, said Dr. Bose:-- It is the obvious, the insistent, the blatant that often blinds us to the essential. And in solving the mystery that underlies life, the enlightenment will come not by the study of the complex man, but through the simpler plant. It is the unsuspected forces, hidden to the eyes of men,--the forces imprisoned in the soil and the stimuli of alternating flash of light and the gloomings of darkness these and many others will be found to maintain the ceaseless activity which we know as the fulness of throbbing life. This is likewise true of the congeries of life which we call a society or a nation. The energy which moves this great mass in ceaseless effort to realise some common aspiration, often has its origin in the unknown solitudes of a village life. And thus the history of some efforts, not forgotten, which emanated from Faridpore, may be found not unconnected with which India is now meeting her problems to-day. How did these problems first dawn in the minds of some men who forecast themselves by half a century? How fared their hopes, how did their dreams become buried in oblivion? Where lies the secret of that potency which makes certain efforts apparently doomed to failure, rise renewed from beneath the smouldering ashes? Are these dead failures, so utterly unrelated to some great success that we may acclaim to day? When we look deeper we shall find that this is not so, that as inevitable as in the sequence of cause and effect, so unrelenting must be the sequence of failure and success. We shall find that the failure must be the antecedent power to lie dormant for the long subsequent dynamic expression in what we call success. It is then and then only that we shall begin to question ourselves which is the greater of the two, a noble failure or a vulgar success. As a concrete example, I shall relate the history of a noble failure which had its setting in this little corner of the earth. And if some of the audience thought that the speaker has been blessed with life that has been unusually fruitful, they will soon realise that the power and strength that nerved me to meet the shocks of life were in reality derived at this very place, where I witnessed the struggle which overpowered a far greater life. STIMULUS OF CONTACT WITH WESTERN CULTURE