perly diffused, raise the frame out of the water, easing off the water in such a manner, that the uniformity of the pulp spread shall continue after the frame is clear of the water and the paper is made.

To dry it, the frame is set endwise, near a large fire; and so soon as it is dry, the sheet is peeled off the bottom of the frame and folded up. When (which seldom is the case) it is deemed needful to smooth and polish the surface of the paper, the dry sheets are laid on wooden boards and rubbed, with the convex entire side of the conch-shell; or in case of the sheets of paper being large, with the flat surface of a large rubber of hard and smooth grained wood; no sort of size is ever needed or applied, to prevent the ink from running. It would, probably, surprise the paper-makers of England, to hear that the Kachar Bhoteahs can make up this paper into fine smooth sheets of several yards square. This paper may be purchased at Káthmándú in almost any quantity, at the price of 17 annas sicca per dharni of three seers; and the bricks of dried pulp may be had* at the same place, for from 8 to 10 annas sicca per dharni. Though called Népálese, the paper is not in fact made in Népál proper. It is manufactured exclusively in Cis-Himálayan Bhote, and by the race of Bhoteahs, denominated, in their own tongue, Rangbo, in contradistinction to the Trans-Himálayan Bhoteahs, whose vernacular name is Sokhpo.t The Rangbo or Cis-Himalayan Bhoteahs are divided into several tribes (such as Múrmi, Lapcha, &c., &c.), who do not generally intermarry, and who speak dialects of the Bhote or Tibet language so diverse, that ignorant as they are, several of them cannot effectually communicate together. They are all somewhat ruder, darker, and smaller than the Sokhpos or Trans-Himálayan Bhoteahs, by whom they are all alike held in slight esteem, though most evidently essentially one and the same with themselves in race and in language, as well as in religion.

*The pulp is dried and made up into the shape of bricks or tiles, for the convenience of transport. In this form it is admirably adapted for transmission to England. See the P.S.

The Néwár language has terms precisely equivalent to these. The Rangbo being called in Néwárí, Paloo Sen; and the Sokhpo here spoken of is not really a different being from the Soghpoun nomade, the name ordinarily applied in Bhote to the Mongols. But this word has, at least, a different sense in the mouths of the Tibetans, towards this frontier, on both sides of the snows.

To return to our paper-making,—most of the Cis-Himálayan Bhoteahs, east of the Kali river, make the Népálese paper; but the greatest part of it is manufactured in the tract above Népál proper, and the best market for it is afforded by the Népálese people; hence probably it derived its name: a great quantity is annually made and exported southwards, to Népál and Hindustan, and northwards, to Sokya-Gumba, Digarchi, and other places in Tramontane Bhote. The manufactories are mere sheds, established in the midst of the immense forest of CisHimalayan Bhote, which affords to the paper-makers an inexhaustible supply, on the very spot, of the firewood and ashes, which they consume so largely; abundance of clear water (another requisite) is likewise procurable everywhere in the same region. I cannot learn by whom or when the valuable properties of the paper plant were discovered; but the Népálese say that any of their books now existent, which is made of Palmira leaves, may be safely pronounced, on that account, to be 500 years old: whence we may, perhaps, infer that the paper manufacture was founded about that time. I conjecture that the art of paper-making was got by the Cis-Himálayan Bhoteahs, via Lhassa, from China; a paper of the very same sort being manufactured at Lhassa; and most of the useful arts of these regions having flowed upon them, through Tibet, from China; and not from Hindústan.

Népal Residency, November 1831.

P.S.-Dr. Wallich having fully described the paper plant, it would be superfluous to say a word about it. The raw produce or pulp (beat up into bricks) has been sent to England, and declared by the ablest persons to be of unrivalled excellence, as a material for the manufacture of that sort of paper upon which proof engravings are taken off. The manufactured produce of Népál is, for office records, incomparably better than any Indian paper, being as strong and durable as leather almost, and quite smooth enough to write on. It has been adopted in one or two offices in the plains, and ought to be generally substituted for the flimsy friable material to which we commit all our records.

A. CAMPBELL.

SECTION XIV.

PRE-EMINENCE OF THE VERNACULARS; OR, THE ANGLICISTS ANSWERED:

BEING FOUR LETTERS ON THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE OF INDIA.*

PREFACE.

THREE of the four following letters were first published several years back, and lest it should be supposed that the course of time has antiquated their reasonings, I beg leave to suggest that arguments so general are not so rapidly affected by time, and that in point of fact the Macaulayism of one cycle is but the Trevelyanism +

"In Alsace and Lorraine the peasantry after two centuries of subjection to France do not know one word of French. In Wales, in Sles wic, and everywhere in Austria and Russia, we see all efforts to force the ruling language on a subject race resented, even when light, civilisation, and enjoyment of equal rights follow in the train of this denationalising schoolmaster."-Times, April 25, 1872.

"There are in almost every department vast hoards of truth which do not exist in an available form, and which, however necessary for us, form no part of our ordinary teaching. When our school-books have been rewritten, and when the proved results of research have been incorporated with them, the benefit will be in every way immense."--Article on Mr. Gladstone's Address to the King's College Students, Times, July 10, 1876.

"Hitherto the English people have begun at the wrong end, and have been educating downwards instead of upwards. What is of real importance is to teach the poor man to do the best for himself, to enlighten the ignorance, and to dissipate the prejudices which make his life so much harder than it need be. We have confidence in English good sense, and expect the training-school to do much good." -Times, May 25, 1874.

+ These words are used with all honour and respect as the readiest means of speaking of well-known acta et scripta of well-known men, of whom the genius of the one and the benevolence of the other command my unfeigned homage. Mr. Macaulay's Minute is but a second edition of Mr. Trevelyan's Treatise.

of another, and that the recent practical measures of Lord Hardinge are but the effectuation of the doctrines contended against in these letters. I admit the sagacity and decision with which Lord Hardinge has carried out the most accredited educational maxims of his predecessors; I admit the possibility of these measures of our revered Governor-General supplying the public service with a superior class of native functionaries, though I confess the apprehension that this new class of functionaries may prove competent in our special acquirements only by losing all competency in their own! But I contend that anything worthy the name of national education, as being addressed to remedy the intellectual and moral wants of the mass of the people, is not comprised in these measures which address themselves only or chiefly to the wants of the public service; and I would add with submission that the principles and reasonings upon which rest that avowed preference for English, which dates its present ascendancy from the days of Lord Bentinck and Mr. Macaulay, are very far inferior in philosophic comprehensiveness, as well as in benevolence and expediency, to the principles and reasonings whence were deduced, according to the wants of that age, the educational maxims of a Hastings (Warren) and a Wellesley. I confess an unlimited preference for the latter, not only because it is infinitely more practicable to make Europeans familiar with the words and things of India, than to make Indians familiar with the words and things of Europe, but also because the former course tends perpetually to rebuke and subdue, the latter course to excuse and foster, those peccant idiosyncrasies of the haughty island race to whom God has committed this land, which half neutralise the blessings derived from the no less characteristic integrity and energy of that race. The vivifying spirit of our sound knowledge, which it is so desirable to diffuse throughout India, is no way inseparably connected with its lingual vehicle; and, whilst every step we make in the grand project of idigenating that knowledge in India by means of vernacularisation will prove a bond of blessed union between ourselves and the mass of our subjects, and a safe, a sure, and an universally operative agent of the desiderated change in them, the contrary project of Anglicisation will help to widen the existing lamentable gulf that divides us from the mass of the people, and put into the hands of the few among themselves an exclusive and dangerous power, quite similar in essential character to that power which for ages past the scribes and priests of the East have wielded, to the deplorable detriment

of the spiritual and temporal welfare of their fellows, and therefore possibly destined only to perpetuate in a new phase the ancient curse of this land, or exclusive learning! Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, have proved the curse of this land, not so much by reason of the false doctrines they have inculcated as by reason of the administrative mystery they have created and upheld; and I hold it to surpass the wit of man to demonstrate that that terrible mystery will not be perpetuated by English; for, long ages must elapse before public institutions and public opinion become omnipotent in the interior of this land, and in the meanwhile, all those who possess the exclusive knowledge will find but too ample a field for the exercise of its power in prosecution of the selfish ends of ambition and avarice, and in despite of our best efforts at prevention. But, without saying more in repetition of the letters themselves upon the dangers incident to an English organ of knowledge, I may glance at the objection founded upon its difficulty of acquisition and consequent unsuitableness to the wants and necessities of the many. But this topic also having been amply treated in the letters, I notice it here only to call attention to the essential fact that in the practical proposition I have deduced from my general reasonings, there is nothing whatever savouring of preference for one over another organ of instruction. The learned languages of the East and of the West, English and the vernaculars of India, all meet with equal favour in the proposed Normal College; and, whilst it is assumed that the vast project of Europeanising the Indian mind calls for express specific measures subsidiary to education properly so called, it is endeavoured so to shape those measures as to reconcile the adequate cultivation of difficult knowledge by the few with an incessant supply of improved means of easy knowledge for the many. It seems to me that English, not less than Sanskrit or Arabic, is far too difficult for the many; that such studies to produce the expected fruit must form the life-long labour of an appropriate body, the pioneers of a new literature; and that if this corps be adequately equipped and provided for, and dedicated to the specific functions of translating and of teaching, in the manner expressed in my fourth letter, the interests of deep learning will be duly attended to without any risk of its running into monastic dreaminess or subtilty, and at the same time that the two great wants of ordinary education, or good teachers and good books, will be systematically provided for. Thus the advocate for English and the advocate for the learned orient tongues, and the advocate for

VOL. II.

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