India’s loss

WHILE it was inevitable that the passing away of a man (Surendranath Banerjea) who had done such stout battle on behalf of the motherland for so many strenuous years and filled such a conspicuous place in men’s minds and affections for so long would cause the widest and most sincere sorrow in all parts of India, there are two things which lend peculiar poignancy to this national grief. One is the consciousness that with Banerjea’s death, the last of the great personal inks that connected India’s living present with her near past disappears. He was undoubtedly the last of the race of giants who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century essayed the extremely difficult task of making the dry bones in India’s open valley instinct with life. And in this case, the last representative of the race was also the first and most eminent. It is, indeed, no disparagement of any of the great men who either preceded Banerjea or were his contemporaries to say that not one of them can claim so large a measure of the pioneer’s credit either for evolving the sense of a common nationality in India or for teaching India to demand her political rights. He was undoubtedly the father of political agitation in the sense in which we know it today. Before his time, there had been public bodies, public meetings and newspapers, but such a thing as an organised political agitation which embraced the whole of India’s politically self-conscious people or, at any rate, large portions of them in its majestic sweep was not known. He was the first of India’s leaders to undertake a whirlwind campaign of lecturing on political subjects in all principal cities of Upper India. India’s loss