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

An impulse from outside reacts on impressionable bodies in two different
ways, depending on whether the recipient is inert or fully alive. The
inert is fashioned after the pattern of the impression made on it, and
this in infinite repetition of one mechanical stamp. But when an
organism is fully alive, the answering reaction is often of an
altogether different character to the impinging stimulus. The outside
shocks stir up the organism to answer feebly or to utmost in ways as
multitudinous and varied as life itself. So the first impetus of Western
education impressed itself on some in a dead monotony of imitation of
things Western; while in others it awakened all that was greatest in the
national memory. It is the release of some giant force which lay for
long time dormant. My father was one of the earliest to receive the
impetus characteristic of the modern epoch as derived from the West. And
in his case