Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/293

Rh proportions are those of thana Jehanabad in South Behar and thana Daulatbazar in the Moorshedabad district where there are about six children in every 100 who receive some instruction, leaving 94 wholly uninstructed; and those of thana Nanglia in the Beerbhoom district and the city of Moorshedabad in which there are about eight children in every 100 who receive some instruction, leaving 93 wholly uninstructed. While ignorance is so extensive, can it be a matter of wonder that poverty is extreme, that industry languishes, that crime prevails, and that in the adoption of measures of public policy, however salutary and ameliorating their tendency. Government cannot reckon with confidence on the moral support of an intelligent and instructed community? Is it possible that a benevolent, a wise, a just Government can allow this state of things any longer to continue?

Fifth.—It has been already shown that the schools for girls are exclusively of European origin; and I made it an object to ascertain in those localities in which a census of the population was taken whether the absence of public means of native origin for the instruction of girls was to any extent compensated by domestic instruction. The result is that, in thanas Nanglia, Culna, Jehanabad, and Bhawara, domestic instruction was not in any one instance shared by the girls of those families in which the boys enjoyed its benefits, and that in the city of Moorshedabad and in thana Daulatbazar of the Moorshedabad district I found only five and those Musalman families, in which the daughters received some instruction at home. In one of these instances a girl about seven years of age was taught by a Kath Molla the formal reading of the Koran; in another instance two girls, about eight and ten years of age, were taught Persian by their father, a Pathan, whose object in instructing his daughters was stated to be to procure a respectable alliance for them; and in the three remaining families four girls were taught mere reading and writing. This is another feature in the degraded condition of native society. The whole of the juvenile female population, with exceptions so few that they can scarcely be estimated, are growing up without a single ray of instruction to dawn upon their minds.

Sixth.—In the account given of school instruction it has been shown, with considerable minuteness, to what classes of society, in respect of religion and caste, the children belong; but in the account of domestic instruction the only distinction drawn