Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/314

254 The chief exception to the general submissiveness to every person or thing bearing the form or semblance of public authority regards the subject of religion in which they do not discover the slightest disposition to recognize the right of Government to interfere. On the contrary, joined to an exemplary tolerance of differences in creed and practice, there is a jealousy of any appearance of such authoritative interference. I had frequent occasions to remove from the minds of the learned and religious classes the fears they entertained on this point; and I have reason to believe that the occasional instances of opposition or distrust that occurred to me in which no opportunity of explanation was afforded originated from the same cause.

The next form in which Government influence may be conceived to be employed for the promotion of education is by making it compulsory, and enacting that every village should have a school. I hope the time will come when every village shall have a school, but the period has not yet arrived when this obligation can be enforced. Such a law, direct and intelligible, would be preferable to a mere recommendation which might be understood in a double sense, but it would be premature. It would be ordering the people to do what they are too poor and too ignorant to do willingly or well, if at all. It would be neither to follow nor to lead but to run counter to native public opinion. Those who in respect of caste or wealth constitute the higher classes do not need any such coercive means to induce them to instruct their children. Those who in respect of caste may be called the middle classes are convinced of the advantages of education, but they are in general poor and many of them would feel such a measure to be severe and oppressive. The lower classes consisting both of Hindus and Musalmans and of numerous sub-divisions and varieties of caste and occupation greatly exceed the others in number, and they are for the most part by general consent consigned to ignorance. In many villages they are the sole, in others the most numerous inhabitants, and such a compulsory law as I have supposed would be received with universal astonishment and dismay—with dismay by themselves and with astoinshmentastonishment [sic] if not derision by the superior classes. A national system of education will necessarily have chiefly in view the most numerous classes of the population, but in their present state of moral and social preparation we can approach them only by slow and almost imperceptible steps. We can effectually raise them only by aiding their voluntary efforts to rise; and at present the prejudice against their instruction is nearly as strong and as general in their own minds as in the minds of others. In the preceding pages I have shown that it has begun to give way in Bengal and Behar; and in the records of the General Committee of Public Instruction I find an apt illustration both of the existence of the prejudice in the North-Western