Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/207

Rh employed merely as assistants under my own eye, and the waqifkars, who had hitherto acted only as avant-couriers might be sent separately to different villages, or groups of villages, with the necessary forms to collect the information required, while I should exercise a general superintendence and control over their movements, and they should at fixed intervals report their proceedings to me. This was accordingly done, and thus increased vigour was infused into the operations.

Up to this point the forms I had employed were very imperfect, and a useful improvement of them was suggested by the people themselves, I found that while some were very careless about the correctness of the information they gave me, others were so desirous of securing accuracy and giving me satisfaction, that they made out a list of every house in the village, with the name of the head of each family and the number of its inmates of different ages. I took the hint, and thenceforth requested that such a list should be made out in all cases, with the addition of the caste and trade of the family and other details already mentioned. The particularity and minuteness of the forms constitute an important guard against mistake and error on the part of the agents employed, since the multiplication of details is the multiplication of the means of comparison and thereby of the means of checking oversight, culpable neglect, or intentional misrepresentation. It would be more difficult to invent such returns in any consistent form capable of bearing examination than honestly and diligently search out and record the real facts.

These were the modes of investigation I employed in the district of Rajshahi, of which the results have already been reported; and all that I was able to effect from the end of July to the middle of September in that district was almost wholly limited to one out of thirteen police sub-divisions. This was not equal to my own wishes and expectations, and yet I felt that I had done all that could be reasonably expected of me, having kept myself constantly in motion in the height of the rainy season in an inundated district. I immediately brought to the notice of the General Committee of Public Instruction the unavoidably limited local extent to which the inquiry had been carried, and in soliciting further instructions proposed that I should be authorized in like manner in every district I should visit to select one police sub-division as a sample of the whole district. This limitation was approved and sanctioned.

I next moved into the adjoining district of Moorshedabad; and as my attention was to be confined to one thana, it was important to select one that would form a fair specimen of the whole district. With that view, on the recommendation of those natives and Europeans who appeared to possess the best acquaintance with