Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose delivered the following Address, on the 25th
February 1917, to the students of the Presidency College on receiving
their _Arghya_ and congratulations on the occasion of his knighthood. It
was published in the Modern Review for March 1917--Volume XXI, p. 343.
In your congratulations for the recent honour, you have overlooked a
still greater that came to me a year ago, when I was gazetted as your
perpetual professor, so that the tie which binds me to you is never to
be severed. Thirty-two years ago I sought to be your teacher. For the
trust that you imposed on me could I do anything less than place before
you the highest that I knew? I never appealed to your weaknesses but
your strength. I never set before you that was easy but used all the
compulsion for the choice of the most difficult. And perhaps as a
reward for these years of effort I find all over India those who have
been my pupils occupying positions of the highest trust and
responsibility in different walks of life. I do not merely count those
who have won fame and success but I also claim many others who have
taken up the burden of life manfully and whose life of purity and
unselfishness has brought gleams of joy in suffering lives.