Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/360

300 of native agency which may convey the impression to the native community that the object is one in which Government feels little interested, and unless means are employed to counteract such an impression, it may paralyse every exertion that the inspector and examiners may make. One means that may be suggested would be the publication, in some authentic form, of the sentiments and intentions of Government and of its expectations of native co-operation, embodied in a resolution, declaration, or address which would receive general circulation in all the English and native newspapers. The names and appointments of the inspectors and examiners should be published in the Gazette, giving them an official status of respectability. The commissioner of the division and the magistrate of the district should be instructed to give them support and countenance in every legitimate way, as was before suggested; and, in like manner, the proposed publication in the Gazette of the results of the periodical examinations, would have a beneficial effect.

A practical danger to which the efficiency of the measure may be exposed will arise from the want of a vigilant, prompt, and efficient superintendence exercised over the examiners. To supply such a superintendence I have proposed the appointment of an inspector for all the districts of a division. His duty would be generally to give efficiency to the plan, to counsel and guide the examiners, to receive and transmit their reports with his own observations, and the instructions of the General Committee for their guidance, and further to aid collectors of khas mehals, zemindars on their estates, and talookdars, maliks, and ryots in villages in organizing the proposed village-institutions with the endowments for their permanent support. The inspectors and examiners will be placed under the authority of the General Committee of Public Instruction. As the mainspring of the whole machinery will be found in this body, I trust that my anxiety for the success of a measure from which, if adopted, much good may arise, will not be interpreted in a sense disrespectful to the Committee, through which this report is forwarded to Government, if I add that its constitution does not appear adapted to a purpose which was not contemplated when it was originally formed and since re-modelled. The number of individuals composing the Committee, the fact that, with the exception of the Secretary, their services are gratuitous and occasional, and that all the members without exception including the Secretary have other weighty duties to perform, must make it at least doubtful whether they can exercise a constant and systematic superintendence over an extended scheme of national instruction.

With the most cordial co-operation on the part of Government and its functionaries, and with the most vigorous superintendence by the General Committee of Public Instruction and by inspectors, much will depend upon the Selection of examiners. If well