for an instant, admitted to be a closing with the lesser ones. Once for all, I would distinctly state, that I conceive the question to relate to the plan and outline of a system of general* education for the people of India. It is high time that some such plan should be devised, and having been devised, should be steadily adhered to by the majority of private educational establishments, as well as by the Government, quoad the extent of its patronage of education. Nor can I fail to deplore that bias towards the fashionable Anglomania which led Lord William Bentinck, when his attention had been momentarily arrested by this question, to proceed per saltum from the obvious absurdities of Orientalism to the obvious excellences of Occidentalism, without perceiving that, as usual, the real practical case-involving of necessity the consideration of local fitness as well as of abstract perfection, and of means as well as of ends-could have little affinity with such a vulgar palpable extreme. How long are we to go on picking up straggling students, and instructing them according to the unaided dictates of individual caprice? The smaller the funds at the disposal of Government to this end, the more carefully should they be husbanded by uniform system steadily prosecuted. I admit, at once and freely, the folly of squandering any portion of those funds upon oriental literature considered as, per se, the matter of instruction-or upon the learned languages considered as, in any way, its media. But if the most insuperable obstacles exist to the unqualified transmission of English ideas in the English language, are we not necessarily thrown upon those languages and that literature for the indirect means of removing such obstacles, through vernacularisation and through the countenance and sanction of established notions? And to what source save the public exchequer can we look for the adequate and steady supply of these appliances and helps of the only sort of education in European lore which the people or can or will accept? If the obstacles to direct measures be real, of what use can be the hardy denial of them? And is not their reality attested by the concurrent testimony of history, of the laws and in

:

This is the point, a general system or what is needful to lay the foundation of such for particular cases, as of princes and men of rank, the question is different, or rather there is here no question of admissible exceptions to the general plan, and it may be readily admitted that such persons should be taught in the English language or rather taught that language as well as other things.

stitutions of the land, and of our daily and hourly experience of the people's conduct, towards us and towards one another?* And is it not most unworthy of us to oppose to such testimony as the above, which is co-equal with the magnitude of what is testified to, the favourable state of our schools at Calcutta and at one or two other little Goshens, bearing some such proportion to that magnitude as the contribution of a single river to the mass of the oceanic waters?

Let me ask you, sir, as a Christian missionary, what you think of the general result of those efforts at sowing the seed without dressing the ground, which belong to the story of religious missions in the East generally, during the last two and a half centuries? The miserable failure of these efforts, after so much apparent promise, I have always heard ascribed principally to their unprepared and exotic character, incapable of striking root into the household wants and habits of the instructed. As it is with religious, so is it with temporal, Truth: the difficulty is to work it into the warp and woof of the popular mind: and until it is so interwoven, it can neither have durability nor efficacy, let zealots affirm what they please. How often was not Europe amused, for a century, with the tale that the East was rapidly and generally evangelising? Such as were those assurances, such are the present allegations about the ability and the eagerness of the people of India to drink our knowledge undiluted from the fountain head of English. They cannot, and they may not, so drink they have neither the means, nor the will, nor the permission so to do. The English language is too costly for them; sheer English truths are too alien to their distorted judgments, narrow experiences and immediate wants, as well as too repugnant to that dominant influence presiding over their minds, to find unprepared admission. Let it be granted that the first object is to disenchant the popular mind of India! Do you propose to break the spell which now binds it by the facilities and attractions of the English language? Or, do you imagine that those magicians to whom the spell is power and wealth and honour unbounded, and whose vigilance has maintained its unabated influence for 3000

Of the 100 Brahmans and Kshetriyas composing my escort, no ten will eat together; no ten of the one or of the other tribe. Yet the natives have no prejudices!!!

years, have, merely to serve your ends, been suddenly stricken with infatuation? To them belong the parents' minds; to those of the parents, the minds of the children. Say that the children were yours for six hours per diem; would not the rest of their time be necessarily passed at home amid home's habitual associations; which, of what nature they are, may, I trust, be briefly indicated without offence, by a glance at the seemingly forgotten frame work of Indian society.

Two circumstances remarkably distinguish and designate the social system of India: one, its inseparable connection with a ✓ recondite literature: the other, the universal precurrency of its divine sanctions through all the offices of life, so as to leave no corner of the field of human action as neutral ground.

Can these premises be denied? And, if not denied, can it be necessary to deduce from them a demonstration of the unbounded power of the men of letters in such a society? or of the consequent necessity for procuring, as far as possible, their neutrality in respect to the inchoation of measures, the whole virtual tendency of which is to destroy that power? Touch what spring of human action you please, you must touch, at the same time, the established system. Touch the spring with any just and generous view of removing the pressure which that system has laid on its native elasticity; and you must, at the same moment, challenge the hostility of that tremendous phalanx of priestly sages which wields an inscrutable literature for the express purpose of perpetuating the enthralment of the popular

mind.

However much the splendour of our political power may seem to have abashed these dark men, the fact is that their empire over the hearts and understandings of the people has been and is almost entirely unaffected by it. With the Saga of Pompeii they say, 'The body to Cæsar, the mind to us.-A profound ambition, suited to the subtile genius of their whole devices, and which I fear some of us commit the lordly absurdity of misinterpreting into impotency or indifference! Before we have set foot almost upon their empire, it is somewhat premature to question their resources for its defence against intrusion. Their tactics are no vulgar ones; nor will they commit themselves or sooner or further than is needful. We now purpose to

spread our knowledge; they know it, and they know the consequence. But so have we, for half a century, purposed the spread of our religion! The purpose must become act, and the act become, or seem likely to become, generally successful, ere these subtile men will confront us openly; and perhaps not then, if heaven inspire us with the prudence to conciliate, check, and awe them by the freest possible resort to that sacred literature which they dare not deny the authority of, however used; and which assuredly is capable of being largely used for the diffusion of Truth! Time has set its solemn impress on that literature: the last rays of the national integrity and glory of this land are reflected from its pages: consummate art has interwoven with its meaner materials all those golden threads which nature liberally furnishes from the whole stock of the domestic and social affections and duties. To the people it is the very echo of their heart's sweetest music: to their pastors their dangerous and powerful pastors-it is the sole efficient. source of that unbounded authority which they possess. To deny the existence of that authority is mere moon-struck idiocy. To admit it is, I conceive, to admit the necessity of compromise and conciliation, so far as may be.

Facillime jubetur exemplo. The text is in Seneca. Now for the commentary. The Moslems, our immediate predecessors in dominion, swayed the sceptre of India, with all the pomp and resources of domestic rule, for 500 years. They had a national system of opinions; and millions of immigrants flowed into the adopted land to back the precepts of imperial pleasure in recommending that system to general adoption.

They colonised; they naturalised; they bade the administration adopt their speech; and, from first to last, nor prince nor peasant among them forgot that their first duty to their new country was to make it consentaneous in doctrine with themselves. What was the ultimate result?

That India cleaved to its own institutions, and half imposed them on the conquerors! Now, sir, let me ask you seriously,

Reasoning may be refused attention. Wherefore I propose for consideration the fact of Mr. Wilkinson's success. Can the fact be denied? Mr. Wilkinson and myself are now about to extend the experiment by printing Ashu Ghosha's argument from the Shastras against caste.

whether, with such an instance staring us in the face, it be not the very extremity of fraud or folly to allege that the people of this country have no material prejudices in favour of the language, the literature, or the customs, of the'r fathers?

I am sorry, as I have said, to dissent from the prevalent dicta. of well-disposed and active friends of India. But I believe a deep and abiding sense of the nature and extent of existing prejudices to be a cardinal maxim never to be lost sight of, by those who would safely and successfully rebaptize the Indian mind in the fount of European knowledge. And when I see and hear the proceedings of our native schools daily urged in proof that no such prejudices exist, and the Government lending itself, quoad the resources at its disposal, to a system of education implying their non-existence, by reason of this supposed proof, I am lost in astonishment. Granting the premises, the conclusion has no more just proportion to them, than a molehill to the Himalaya! I admit that our knowledge is better fitted, by its superior practical utility, to make way in India, than that of the Moslems. I admit that our technical means of diffusion (the press), are vastly more efficient than any they could employ. But, sir, schools and scholastic lessons are neither the only, nor the most potent, media for the inculcation of new modes of thought and action among nations: And when I contrast the plenitude of those other and more operative means in the hands of the Moslems with their penury in our hands, I am compelled by superior evidence to own that where they failed, success cannot crown our efforts, unless consummate prudence in the use of all local appliances be added to the intrinsic efficacy of our knowledge and of the aid of the press. I point solemnly to the uniform language of the laws, the unchanging voice of history, and the general tenor of what we daily see and hear among the people, as concurring to prove beyond a question, that the prejudices and prepossessions of this land are the profoundest, most exclusive, and most pervading through all acts and motives, of any upon record! And such being the case, I ask in God's name what probability is there that we, few as we are and miserably insulated as we are, should make any durable beneficial or general impression upon those prejudices and prepossessions, by means of such an abstraction as knowledge, without deliberate measures of gene