Lajpat Rai was one of those men into whose soul the wrongs of their people enter. By nature averse from politics, he devoted himself to those deeper questions which lie beyond the touch of governments good or bad, and it was not till he was forty that the decisive change came. It is true that he joined the Congress movement in 1888, within two or three years of its beginning; but no one has more severely criticized the Congress and its methods—its unwieldy size, its holiday aspect, its failure to touch the poverty and ignorance of India, and its mistaken confidence in the power of speeches and resolutions for the redress of political wrongs.[63] It was significant of his strength of character and indifference to popularity, that after the breach in the Surat Congress, he gave his immense influence to the Moderate party, and declared he would fight under the old banner, as I have described. But it was still more characteristic that, when the Congress had vanished, he remained in Surat for the Social and Swadeshi Conferences, and organized a famine-relief fund there, just as if nothing had happened. Deeper things than can be reached by Government or speeches have occupied his life. Born at Jaguran, in the district of Ludhiana, where his father taught Persian and Urdu, he became a student at the Government College in Lahore, and a Pleader in the Courts there just at the time when the Arya Samaj was engaged in its earliest struggle for religious and social reform. [Illustration: LALA LAJPAT RAI. _Photo by P. Girdhar Roy & Sons, Lahore._ [_Face p. 296._ ] Under the influence of Hans Raj, now the Principal of the Anglo-Vedic College, a direct and silent man of similar austerity and devotion of life, he joined the Samaj and threw himself into its conflict against idol-worship, child-marriage, girl-widowhood, caste subdivisions, and the other abuses of orthodox Hinduism. Poverty, ignorance, and famine appeared to him the chief outward and visible evils of his country, and for many years, in the intervals of heavy professional work, he lived the life of what one would call a philanthropist, if the word had not gathered round it the inhuman associations of charity. He directed orphanages, superintended education, helped to found Swadeshi banks and mills long before Swadeshi became a political weapon; he administered famine funds—with a side-glance at the unhappy “famine Christians,” the Samajists say he rescued thousands of souls from famine and conversion—and one of his great achievements was the relief of the destitute in the Kangra valley after the terrible earthquake of 1905.