Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/280

220 neighbourhoods and proceed to a distance, greater or less in different cases, to receive instruction; and this unwillingness cannot be lessened if it should appear that they will be placed in frequent and unavoidable communication with teachers and sircars of the male sex and of youthful age, and in some instances with the corrupt and vicious of their own sex. To re-assure the minds of native parents, native matrons are employed, as messengers and protectors to conduct the girls to and from school; but it is evident that this does not inspire confidence, for, with scarcely any exception, it is only children of the very poorest and lowest castes that attend the girls’ schools, and their attendance is avowedly purchased. The backwardness of native parents of good caste may be further explained by the fact that the girls’ schools are under the sole direction of Missionaries; and the case of the Beerbhoom school shows that to combine the special object of conversion with the general object of female instruction must be fatal to the latter without accomplishing the former purpose. These remarks must be understood as strictly limited to the schools I have specifically described, and as inapplicable even amongst them to those in which the scholars, as in the case of female orphans, are under the constant, direct, and immediate superintendence of their Missionary instructors.

. A census of the population within the limits of which this part of the inquiry was confined was found an indispensable preliminary, and the results of the census will, therefore, in the first place be given.

In the nineteen thanas included within the city jurisdiction there are 373 mahallas and villages. The mahallas are the streets, quarters, or wards of the city properly so called. The villages contain the scattered agricultural population.

The number of families is 34,754, averaging 93·4 families to each mahalla or village. The number of Hindu families is 24,094, of Musalman families 10,647, and of Native Christian families 13.