Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/202

142 or the most limited mental cultivation would remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan, being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both systems of faith and have been handed down from time immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now found.

Having come into this district not altogether unprepared to appreciate the character of the natives; moving amongst them, conversing with them, endeavouring to ascertain the extent of their knowledge and to sound the depths of their ignorance; inquiring into their feelings and wishes, their hopes and their fears, and frequently reflecting on all that I have witnessed and heard, and all that I have now recorded, I have not been able to avoid speculating on the fittest means of raising and improving their character in such a district as that to which the present Report relates. To develope the views that have occurred to me, and the mode in which I would carry those views into effect, would require more leisure than I can command at this season amid the active duties of local inquiry. I beg, however, to be permitted now to remark that, according to the best judgment I have been able to form, all the existing institutions in the district—even the highest, such as the schools of Hindu learning, and the lowest, such as the Mahomedan schools for the formal reading of the Koran, however remote they are at present from purposes of practical utility, and however unfamiliar to our minds as instruments for the communication of pure and sound knowledge, all without exception present organizations which may be turned to excellent account for the gradual accomplishment of that important purpose; and that so to employ them would be the simplest, the safest, the most popular, the most economical, and the most effectual plan for giving that stimulus to the native mind which it needs on the subject of education, and for eliciting the exertions of the natives themselves for their own improvement without which all other means must be unavailing.