and more unfortunate fellow-countrymen. Besides his work as Deputy Magistrate in the Bengal Provincial Service, he was also at various times a fellow of the Calcutta University, a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, an Honorary Magistrate, a founder of the Presidency College, a Justice of the Peace, a member of the Special Committee appointed to conduct the first regular census in Calcutta and the Founder of the Calcutta Literary Society. Yet this list, long as it is, gives but a small conception of the energy and the wide spread sympathies of Nawab Abdul Latif.
His long life covered the greater part of the nineteenth century. Born in 1828, it was given to him to see the great advance socially, morally and economically which that century had brought to India and to Bengal in particular. In his youth, the railway and the telegraph, those two great forerunners of progress and civilisation, were unknown even in the west. He lived to see them completely change the conditions of life in one of the most conservative and slow-moving countries in the world. In 1828 the East India Company still held its Charter and India for six years more was still a land of restrictions. Lord William Bentick had but recently assumed the reins of office and the most famous act of his administration, the abolition of Sati, was yet to come.
Abdul Latif came of a family of distinction which
