1 PREFACE. THE increased facilities of intercourse with Europe are rapidly producing innovations in India, and in Anglo-Indian life. Railways and the electric telegraph, a Civil Service no longer to be appointed on account of its family connections, and a public opinion in England bearing upon Indian Government, must, sooner or later, produce a complete revolution in the ordinary routine of Indian existence. These Tropical Sketches, therefore, will be, in a very few years,-nay, to a great extent, are now probably,-rather views of what has been than of what is; particularly in all that relates to newspapers and their offices. Many of the following chapters were originally written in India, amid the scenes and circumstances which they describe. They have all been carefully revised, however, and, in fact, rewritten for the present work. No man can have been the editor of a newspaper anywhere, without making many personal enemies. This is particularly the case in small communities, such as those of Colonial towns and the capitals of the Indian Presidencies. To such enemies a work issuing from the pen of the obnoxious editor will afford the long-sought opportunity of paying off old scores, of discharging the vials of that wrath which has long been pent up within the breast, uncomfortably and inconveniently. I am perfectly aware, also, that whoever ventures to find fault with any portion of the system of Indian administration, will find many ready to assail him. Some, writing from honest conviction in honest defence of the government they admire or serve; others, to obtain the favour of the authorities, and thereby secure their own promotion or advantage. To the former I would simply observe, that, in the following pages, I confine my condemnation of Indian administration to that department in which I served-the Educational. If I have written strongly on the subject, it is because I feel strongly. Mental philosophy and pure mathematics have been the subjects chiefly taught in the Government Colleges of India. The religion in which the students have been nurtured in infancy, Brahmanism, has been uprooted by the study of geography and astronomy, and no other religion has Government given them the opportunity of inquiring into or embracing. It was but a few months ago that the leading and oldest daily journal in Calcutta-the Bengal Hurkaruwrote as follows: 66 It is a lamentable fact, that in no civilized country on earth has so little been done in the way of public instruction as in India, and even that little is more owing to private enterprise than to any endeavours on the part of Government to place education within the reach of the poor; moreover, the little that has been done-little, considering the hundred millions of the British subjects--has chiefly been done by Missionaries, almost entirely unaided by government." The results of the system pursued in the Government Colleges have been such as might have been anticipated from the studies most patronised-great intellectual acuteness and a total want of moral principle, utter infidelity in religion, combined with an enthusiastic worship of reason and money. Indeed, the members of the reformed Council of Education of Bengal seem to have partially discovered its defects. "Whilst we have trained scholars-" say they in a recent report; “whilst we have trained scholars in scores, who will integrate a difficult problem, no one has ever left our schools whom an officer making a road would employ as an overseer in preference to an English serjeant who can just read and write." Let the leading magazines and reviews in England which have said so much in favour of Government Education in India, particularly Blackwood and the Dublin University, ponder that confession-that and the following, both taken from the same report :-" The want of everything of a practical character in the educational course at present, appears to the Council to be its greatest defect. Everything that strikes the senses, one half of the whole circle of knowledge is, as it were, ignored in our present system of education." All honour |