Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/31

Rh districts within the jurisdiction of the Government of the North-Western Provinces.

“Alluding to the districts in which the Government schools have not yet been established, Mr. Thomason has said:—

“In all these parts there is a population no less teeming, and a people capable of learning. The same wants prevail, and the same moral obligation rests upon the Government, to exert itself for the purpose of dispelling the present ignorance. The means are shown by which a great effect can be produced, the cost at which they can be brought into operation is calculated, the agency is available. It needs but the sanction of the highest authority to call into exercise, throughout the length and breadth of the land, the same spirit of enquiry, and the same mental activity, which is now beginning to characterize the inhabitants of the few districts in which a commencement has been made.

“The sanction which the Lieutenant-Governor, in these words, solicited for an increase of the means which experience has shown to be capable of producing such rich and early fruit, I now most gladly and gratefully propose. And while I cannot refrain from recording anew in this place my deep regret that the ear which would have heard this welcome sanction given, with so much joy, is now dull in death,. [sic] I desire at the same time to add the expression of my feeling, that even though Mr. Thomason had left no other memorial of his public life behind him, this system of general Vernacular Education, which is all his own, would have sufficed to build up for him a noble and abiding monument of his earthly career.

“I beg leave to recommend, in the strongest terms, to the Honorable Court of Directors, that full sanction should be given to the extension of the scheme of Vernacular education to all the districts within the jurisdiction of the North-Western Provinces, with every adjunct which may be necessary for its complete efficiency.

“Allusion is made by the Secretary to the Council of Education, in his report on the Vernacular Schools in the North- Western Provinces, to ‘the utter failure of the scheme of Vernacular Education adopted in Bengal, among a more intelligent, docile and less prejudiced people than those of the North-Western Provinces’. But he adds the encouraging assurance that he is ‘convinced that the scheme above referred to is not only the best adapted to leaven the ignorance of the agricultural population of the North-Western Provinces, but is also the plan best suited for the mass of the people of Bengal and Behar.’

“Since this is so, I hold it the plain duty of the Government of India at once to place within the reach of the people of Bengal and Behar those means of education which, notwithstanding our anxiety to do so, we have hitherto failed in presenting to them in an acceptable form, but which we are told upon the experienced authority of Dr. Mouat are to be found in the successful scheme of the Lieutenant-Governor before us.

“And not to Bengal and Behar only. If it be good for these, it is good also for our new subjects beyond the Jumna. That it will be not only good for them, but most acceptable to them, no one can doubt who has read the reports by Mr. Montgomery and other Commissioners upon indigenous education in the Punjab, which showed results that were little anticipated before they were discovered.

“Wherefore it is, more than ever before, its duty, in every such case as this to act vigorously, cordially, and promptly.”