The speech ends, and there rises a gray Englishman in a black frock-coat. He looks a strong man, and a worldly. Surely he will say: “Yes, Lala Sahib, all this may be true talk, but there’s a _burra krab_ smell in this place, and everything must be _safkaroed_ in a week, or the Deputy Commissioner will not take any notice of you in _durbar_.” He says nothing of the kind. This is a Legislative Council, where they call each other “Honorable So-and-So’s.” The Englishman in the frock-coat begs all to remember that “we are discussing principles, and no consideration of the details ought to influence the verdict on the principles.” Is he then like the rest? How does this strange thing come about? Perhaps these so English office fittings are responsible for the warp. The Council Chamber might be a London Board-room. Perhaps after long years among the pens and papers its occupants grow to think that it really is, and in this belief give _résumés_ of the history of Local Self-Government in England. The black frock-coat, emphasizing his points with his spectacle-case, is telling his friends how the parish was first the unit of self-government. He then explains how burgesses were elected, and in tones of deep fervor announces: “Commissioners of Sewers are elected in the same way.” Whereunto all this lecture? Is he trying to run a motion through under cover of a cloud of words, essaying the well-known “cuttle-fish trick” of the West? He abandons England for a while, and _now_ we get a glimpse of the cloven hoof in a casual reference to Hindus and Mahomedans. The Hindus will lose nothing by the complete establishment of plurality of votes. They will have the control of their own wards as they used to have. So there is race-feeling, to be explained away, even among these beautiful desks. Scratch the Council, and you come to the old, old trouble. The black frock-coat sits down, and a keen-eyed, black-bearded Englishman rises with one hand in his pocket to explain his views on an alteration of the vote qualification. The idea of an amendment seems to have just struck him. He hints that he will bring it forward later on. He is academical like the others, but not half so good a speaker. All this is dreary beyond words. Why do they talk and talk about owners and occupiers and burgesses in England and the growth of autonomous institutions when the city, the great city, is here crying out to be cleansed? What has England to do with Calcutta’s evil, and why should Englishmen be forced to wander through mazes of unprofitable argument against men who cannot understand the iniquity of dirt?