Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/313

Rh they might or might not comply according to their own sense of importance of the object, but usually as an order which it would be folly and madness to thwart or resist. They admitted the importance and utility of the object when it was explained to them but it was not because of its importance and utility that they gave the information required, but because submission to authority is the confirmed habit of the people. Appearing among them instructed and authorized by Government to inquire into the state of native education they could regard me in no other light than as one whom it would be illegal to disobey. In such circumstances all that could be done was to make my request and direct my agents to seek for information after a full explanation afforded in the least offensive manner in order that the people might do heartily what they would otherwise have for the most part done coldly and slavishly. The unauthoritative modes of address thus adopted led on several occasions to an inquiry in return from them whether I was acting only on my private authority or was really empowered by Government to conduct such an investigation. I of course assured them that I was fully authorized as the perwanahs addressed by the Magistrate to his Darogahs and others showed, but that I had been expressly directed, in deference to their feelings and to avoid the possibility of offence, to collect only such information as they themselves might, after proper explanations, voluntarily furnish. The adoption of such a style of address by a Government functionary was apparently new to them, and scarcely intelligible.

The truth appears to be that they are so completely bowed down by ages of foreginforeign [sic] rule that they have lost not only the capacity and the desire, but the very idea, of self-government in matters regarding which the authority of the state is directly or indirectly interposed. They have no conception of government as the mere organ of law and its sanctions. They view it simply as an instrument of power whose behests are absolute, indisputable, and wholly independent of the voluntary co-operation of the individual members of the community. We have thus a Government which desires to rule by law, and a people that wills to be ruled by power. Mere power unsupported by the moral co-operation of the community is weaker than law would be with that co-operation but to call the latter forth must be one of the objects and effects of education by embodying with native public opinion the conviction that the interest of the state and its subjects are the same. It follows that, in devising means to produce that conviction, we must not assume that it already exists, and that the people will, at the mere recommendation of government, understood as such, adopt measures even for their own advantage, or that they will understand a recommendation from such a source in any other way than as a command.