“As I was myself educated in India, was brought up to maturity with Indian students, and have lived among them in many different places, I may claim to know something about them.  As a class they are gentle, affectionate, industrious, well-meaning and highly intelligent.  They are the most malleable of human metal, the finest material for the sculptor of humanity, the most impressionable of wax.  In the right hands they can be moulded to anything, by the right leader led to any height.  And conversely, of them a devil can make fiends.  By the wrong leader they can be led down to any depth.

“The crying need of India is noble men to make noble men of these fine impressionable youths.  Read the enclosed and take it that the writer (who wrote this recently in Gungapur Jail) is typical of a large class of misled, much-to-be-pitied youths, wrecked and ruined and destroyed—­their undoing begun by an unspeakably false and spurious educational ideal, and completed by the writings, and the spoken words of heartless unscrupulous scoundrels who use them to their own vile ends.

“Read, Sir, and realize how truly noble, useful and beautiful is your great work of endeavouring to embarrass our wicked Government, to weaken its prestige here and in England, to encourage its enemies, to increase discontent and unrest, to turn the thoughts of students to matters political, and, in short, to carry on the good work of the usual Self-advertising Visitation M.P.

“Humbly thanking your Honour, and wishing your Honour precisely the successes and rewards that your Honour deserves,

“I remain,

“The dust of your Honour’s feet,

“ILDERIM DOST MAHOMMED.”

And Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, M.P., read as follows:—­

...  And so I am to be hanged by the neck till I am dead, am I?  And for a murder which I never committed, and in the perpetration of which I had no hands?  Is it, my masters?  I trow so.  But I can afford to spit—­for I did commit a murder, nevertheless, a beautiful secret murder that no one could possibly ever bring to my home or cast in my tooth.

“Well, well!  Hang me and grin in sleeve—­and I will laugh on other side of face while dancing on nothing—­for if you think you are doing me in eye, I know I have done you in eye!

“Yes. I murdered Mr. Spensonly, the Chief Secretary of the Nuddee River Commission.

“As the Latin-and-Greeks used to say, ‘Solo fesit’!

“You think Mr. Spensonly died of plague?  So he did.  And who caused him to have plague?  In short, who plagued him? (Ha!  Ha!  An infinite jest!) You shall know all about it and about, as Omar says, for I am going now to write my autobiography of myself, as all great so-called Criminals have done, for the admiration of mankind and the benefit of posterity.  And my fellow-brothers and family-members shall proudly publish it with my photo—­that of a great Patriot Hero and second Mazzini, Robespierre, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Wallace, Charlotte Corday, Kosciusko, and Mr. Robert Bruce (of spider fame).