Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/211

Rh invariably visited and examined; but that in no instance a village-institution has been overlooked is more than I dare affirm, and in point of fact I have sometimes discovered instances in which such institutions had at first escaped attention, I have thought it right to show that this source of error did exist; but I believe that such oversights still remaining undetected are, if any, very few.

In undertaking and conducting this inquiry, a danger which I have kept constantly in view, is lest the agents and servants whom I have found it necessary to employ should be guilty of levying exactions in my name from the villagers. I, therefore, from the first had it fully understood by all whom I permanently or temporarily employed, that if I could discover any of them, from the highest to the lowest, in any act of oppression, violence of deed or of language, or assumption of authority over the villagers, I should instantly dismiss him from his situation. In consequence of this intimation, some of my servants stipulated for an increase of wages beyond what they had previously demanded. This claim I allowed, conceiving that I had a stronger hold upon them than upon others who were not so open and candid. The occasions have been very few on which I have had any reason to believe that oppression was attempted or exercised, and on such occasions the guilty parties were instantly displaced.

The rich were more difficult to manage than the poor, sometimes, for purposes of their own grovelling to the dust before me; at other times superciliously refusing all communication and demanding that a separate perwannah should be addressed to them individually before they would give or permit their dependants to give any of the information required. The difficulty from the selfishness and self-sufficiency of the rich was only greater than that arising from the extreme ignorance of the poor. Many villages did not contain a single person able to write, or even to count; and in such cases all the information had to be collected direct from house to house with very little aid from the villagers themselves. On one occasion I experienced open and pertinacious opposition from a single individual, a Government gomashta, who influenced a circle of villages by his authority; and when his objections were removed, those of the villagers also disappeared. On other occasions teachers both of common schools and schools of learning, from some misapprehension, have concealed themselves to escape the dreaded inquisition. On the other hand, I have had a message sent to me from a village, the inhabitants of which understood that I did not intend to visit them personally, requesting that I would not pass them by; and two pandits followed me to Calcutta from the Burdwan district to communicate the details respecting their schools; of which when in the district itself I had not been