The meetings of the Social Science Association have been a considerable factor in the week’s excitement, attracting a large and representative gathering of persons at every session. A most picturesque figure at these meetings has been the Hindu priest, (Swami Vive Kananda,) who has spoken at several of them upon the deplorable condition of the poor of India and some of the causes which bring it about. In his preaching he has traversed almost every square mile of the great empire, and in his capacity of monk he has entered the homes and studies the lives of the poor people of his race and is not given to even every native.
He is eloquent with the distress and wrongs of his kind. He speaks most fluent and musical English, and is master of a natural and dramatic oratory that is most pesuasive. On Thursday afternoon in the drawing room of the United States Hotel he gave an informal talk, and his habit of orange cloth which, girded about the waist, is monkish only in cut, and his turban of orange stuff wound about his fine head with a grace that would be the despair of a coiffeur, his dark, chiseled face, with the espression of sadness that is usually seen in the Oriental, he made a marked personality in striking contrast to the conventional Westerns who surrounded him. He left to-day for Chicago to attend the Congress of Religions.