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Jain Gazette.
AN EXPLANATION.
How was it? To us who live amidst days of "little Indianism" -when the cry is furiously abroad that we are degenerating and ceasing to produce great men as we did only a generation back-to us, again who can take a calm and careful account of the sixties and seventies of the recently-expired century, the question repeatedly confronts itself, what was it that gave us a Ram Mohan Roy or Iswar Chandra in the intellectual, or a Premchand Roychand in the commercial field? It would be injustice to the great men who attained eminence in the last generation if we ascribe their success to external causes alone. Their merits are beyond question. But we have also the wave of fortune to take into account not the mysterious, unaccountable, capricious fortune distributing ts favours blindly and promiscuonsly: we mean the strange, foreseen conjunction of events beyound human control,
sometimes mend and sometimes mar the most heroic is pts of men and bring success where it is deserved. The useful study of history or biography consists certainly in an analysis and assymilation of those principles of character, inimitable but nevertheless regulative and ideal for ordinary men, that made men intrinsically great, successful or not. But an accurate history is made of two factors, one the essentially personal element and the other, the external non-personal or eventual element. Beside being indispensible in a complete account of life, this latter has a peculiar place in the life of Shet Premchand. If we ignore it, his life may be looked upon as a failure due to his weak character. His great fortune may be taken as the result of blind favouritism in the Darbar of Fortune and the subsequent wreck of his prosperity may be equally well considered as the result of his unbounded greed and avarice. Neither of this was true and we can see this plainly by observing how the favour of Fortune-the irresistible
