150 to upwards of 300, and more teachers were still called for. The same thing also took place at Agra. These are not symptoms of a forced and premature effort, which, as the committee of 1824 justly observed, would have recoiled upon ourselves, and have retarded our ultimate

success.

To sum up what has been said: the Hindu system of learning contains so much truth as to have raised the nation to its present point of civilization, and to have kept it there for ages without retrogading, and so much error as to have prevented it from making any sensible advance during the same long period. Under this system, history is made up of fables, in which the learned in vain endeavour to trace the thread of authentic narrative; its medicine is quackery; its geography and astronomy are monstrous absurdity; its law is composed of loose contradictory maxims, and barbarous and ridiculous penal provisions; its religion is idolatry; its morality is such as might be expected from the example of the gods and the precepts of the religion. Suttee, Thuggee, human sacrifices, Ghaut murder, religious suicides, and other such excrescences of Hinduism, are either expressly enjoined by it, or are directly deduced from the principles inculcated by

it. This whole system of sacred and profane learning is knitted and bound together by the sanction of religion; every part of it is an article of faith, and its science is as unchangeable as its divinity. Learning is confined by it to the Brahmins, the high priests of the system, by whom and for whom it was devised. All the other classes are condemned to perpetual ignorance and dependence; their appropriate occupations are assigned by the laws of caste, and limits are fixed, beyond which no personal merit or personal good fortune can raise them. The peculiar wonder of the Hindu system is, not that it contains so much or so little true knowledge, but that it has been so skilfully contrived for arresting the progress of the human mind, as to exhibit it at the end of two thousand years fixed at nearly the precise point at which it was first moulded. The Mohammedan system of learning is many degrees better, and "resembles that which existed among the nations of Europe before the invention of printing;" so far does even this fall short of the

*These are the words in which Mr. Adam sums up his description of Mohammedan learning in India; and the real state of the case could not be more accurately described. Gibbon's sketch of Moslem learning will be found in the 52d chapter of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, under the heads, "Their real progress in the sciences," and "Want of erudition, taste, and freedom." But

knowledge with which Europe is now blessed. These are the systems under the influence of which the people of India have become what they are. They have been weighed in the balance, and have been found wanting. To perpetuate them, is to perpetuate the degradation and misery of the people. Our duty is not to teach, but to unteach them, not to rivet the shackles which have for ages bound down the minds of our subjects, but to allow them to drop off by the lapse of time and the progress of events.

If we turn from Sanskrit and Arabic learning, and the state of society which has been formed by it, to western learning, and the improved and still rapidly improving condition of the western nations, what a different spectacle presents itself! Through the medium of England, India has been brought into the most intimate connection with this fa

however defective Arabian learning may appear when viewed by the light of modern science, it would be doing great injustice to the Augustan age of the caliphs at Bagdad to compare it with the present æra of Mohammedan literature in India. The Indian Mohammedans are only bad imitators of an erroneous system. Arabic is studied at Calcutta as a difficult foreign language; original genius and research have long since died out, if they ever had any existence, among this class of literary people in India; and the astronomy of Ptolemy and the medicine of Galen are languidly transmitted by the dogmatic teachers of one generation to the patient disciples of the next.

voured quarter of the globe, and the particular claims of the English language as an instrument of Indian improvement have thus become a point of paramount importance. These claims have been thus described by one who will be admitted to have made good his title to an opinion on the subject:

"How then stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue; we must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate; it stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West; it abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions which, considered merely as narratives have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the com

Whoever

fort, or to expand the intellect of man. knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all: in India English is the language spoken by the ruling class; it is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of government; it is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East; it is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Austral-Asia, communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian Empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects."

As of all existing languages and literatures the English is the most replete with benefit to the