There was a little fellow so retired and diffident that I had never heard him make a remark in any of our meetings, though he was always present. He sprang to his feet, lost sight of himself and rose to the occasion. Said he, “I am utterly opposed to inviting any outside Europeans. If we get one of the swells to preside he will look down on us and talk to us as if we were children, fools or outcasts. We have been patronized long enough. We are always put in the background, crowded into the outskirts, treated as scum or menials, except when the Europeans can use us for their own advantage. Then they fawn on us as if we were dogs, to do their bidding. They do not want us anywhere, and always treat us with contempt. Even a blatant Babu is treated with more respect than we are. They will not allow us to enlist as soldiers. They insult us when we ask for employment in the Government offices. The Government Railway Companies and the merchants stick up notices ‘No Eurasians need apply.’ When they advertise for clerks they add, ‘No Eurasians wanted.’ “In the mutiny they made all the use they could of the Eurasians. They were then considered good enough to help them fight and to protect their families. But if another mutiny occurs, the Babus or the Russians may take the country for all the help these haughty aristocrats will get from me. “Don’t I know what I am talking about. My father was a shopkeeper in Lucknow at the time of the mutiny. All of his stores he took into the residency and gave them out to be distributed among the officers and their families. While the stores lasted he was patted on the back. It was Mr. Evans here and Mr. Evans there; let us see Evans! He was put in the most dangerous places of defense. What a favor! When the mutiny was over and others received medals and honors, his name was not even mentioned. He was only a shopkeeper and worse, an Eurasian. When he suggested payment for his stores he was told that he must submit to the usages of war, so he was left without a rupee for the support of his family, and died almost a beggar, though he had taken many thousands of rupees worth of goods into the entrenchment. Officers who had drunk many cases of his wines, and whose families had been kept from dying through his supplies of canned goods, afterwards did not know him when they met him face to face on the road. I could tell of the rebuffs and insults he received from them when he applied for honest work, but what is the use? Everybody knows the story and everywhere it was the same. It is time we stand up for ourselves and demand our right to live. If we are so lacking in energy that we cannot do this, and are so degraded as to be willing to be insulted and patronized as inferiors then the sooner we die the better.”