Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/303

Rh must not be deemed to represent the permanent amount of intellectual and moral instrumentality. For, first, the influences now acting upon native society have a tendency to raise the qualifications of those two classes. The very lowest and most degraded and hitherto wholly uninstructed classes have begun, as has been shown, to move upward into the class receiving the instruction of common schools. This will have the double effect of stimulating the class immediately above them to rise still higher in the scale of acquirement, and with the increased demand for instruction of increasing the emoluments of teachers, and thereby inducing more competent persons to engage in the business of teaching. Even, therefore, if the number of teachers and taught, instructed and uninstructed, should maintain the same proportions, still there will be an increased amount of moral means in the higher range of qualifications which those classes are now acquiring.

But, second, by the very supposition, the same influences that are carrying the instructed classes forward in the race of improvement will also increase the number of the individuals composing them and their proportion to the uninstructed classes. This conclusion does not rest upon questionable grounds. It has been shown that the proportion of juvenile instruction is uniformly higher and in some of the localities much higher than the proportion of adult instruction, and it follows that, when the present generation of learners shall become of mature age, the proportion of adult instruction will be found much higher and consequently the amount of moral instrumentality existing in society greater than it now is. Every individual who passes from the class of the uninstructed to that of the instructed both lessens the proportion of the former and increases that of the latter—both lessens the number to be instructed and increases the number of those who may be employed for the instruction of that lesser number. And the probabilities are great that a large number both of those who belong to the instructed class and of those who pass from the inferior to the higher grades of instruction would, with very little encouragement, be induced to engage in the instruction of others, for in proceeding from one district or from one part of a district to another, next to the general poverty and ignorance, few facts strike the mind more forcibly than the number of those who, with attainments superior to a mere knowledge of reading and writing, are in search of employment and without any regular means of subsistence.

Again, third, it is not only from below, from the uninstructed classes or from those who possess at present the inferior grades of instruction but from above also, from the classes of the learned, that additional instruments will be obtained for the extension of popular education. There can be no doubt that the habits