On October 28th, 1898, there was a great gathering of Old Etonians (never slow to celebrate their own good fortune) at the Café Monico, to say “good-bye and wish "good luck" to the Earl of Minto, GovernorGeneral of Canada, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India, and the Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Bishop of Calcutta. Lord Rosebery, as a distinguished Old Etonian, was in the chair, and proposed the toast of "Our Guests" in the speech which is here printed. ETON THIS is, I think, in some respects the most remarkable dinner at which I have had the honour of assisting. So brilliant is the gathering that I would almost seem to require a pair of smoked glasses to contemplate the various dazzling celebrities who owe their various successes to Eton, and who are assembled round this table. And I should be for my part extremely uneasy at my position in the chair were it not that I well understand that, on an occasion like this, the best service a chairman can render is to say as little as possible and to obliterate himself. I remember a story that the late Lord Granville used to tell me for dinners to outgoing Viceroys and Governors had not been hitherto unknown -they were habitual. Lord Granville was a guest at a dinner to an outgoing Governor of very indifferent powers of speaking, and as the Governor-designate laboured through his speech Lord Granville in sheer weariness cast his eye on the notes of the speech that lay before him and saw marked in red ink, copiously underlined, the words "Here dilate on the cotton trade." I forget the end of the story, but with a man of Lord Granville's readiness of resource it is not difficult to surmise that those notes disappeared on the instant and that the orator very soon followed their example. I shall not be guilty to-night, and I trust that the numerous Viceroys who bristle around me and who are announced to speak will not either, of dilating on the cotton trade, and I think that that is a course that will meet with your approbation. But there is another reason that makes it impossible to speak long on this occasion. There is a theory, well known to the Foreign Office, that every ship of war is, wherever it may be found, the territory of the country to which it belongs, and on that hypothesis I hold that this apartment, which bears all the characteristics of a London coffee-room of the most refined and brilliant kind, is, after all, Eton territory-is Eton; and no one who has had experience of the debates of Parliament, or even of the conversations of Etonians when we were Etonians, will think for a moment otherwise than that brevity is the soul of wit. The words "rot" and "bosh" would have been applied-not, perhaps, improperly-to any one who exceeded the limits of perhaps three or four minutes. This leads me into a vein of thought which is not without its complications. If this is Eton territory, one at most feels as if the celebration should be essentially Etonian in more ways than one, and I seem to see, through a glass darkly, the vision of our Viceroys and Bishop-designate drinking "long glass" as part of their initiation. On the present occasion there is no "long glass present, or I am sure that I should receive your support in moving that that ceremony should be undergone. Yet, after all, there are circumstances in |