Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/372

312 and digested. Teachers also of sufficient repute to attract scholars around them will seldom be found deficient in the power of explaining what they profess to understand and to teach. It is of more importance, however, to remark that Lord Moira anticipated the revival of the liberal sciences among the natives from such a previous education, beginning with the rudiments, as should show the connection of the different branches of learning with each other, explain the right use of science in the business of life, and direct intellectual improvement to the promotion of personal and social morality; and if the schools of learning, as well as the common schools, can be made conducive to such purposes, we may infer from the excellent sense and genuine benevolence which characterize his Minute, that the design would have received His Lordship’s cordial sanction.

No one has more earnestly urged the duty of communicating European knowledge to the natives than Mr. Hodgson, no one has more powerfully shown the importance of employing the vernacular language, as the means of accomplishing that object, and no one has more eloquently illustrated the necessity of conciliating the learned and making them our co-adjutors in this great work of national regeneration:—“Two circumstances,” he says, “remarkably distinguish and designate the social system of India,—one, its inseparable connection with a recondite literature, the other, the universal percurrency of its divine sanctions through all the offices of life, so as to leave no corner of field of human action as neutral ground. Can these premises be denied? And if not denied, can it be necessary to deduce from them a demonstration of the unbounded power of the men of letters in such a society? Or of the consequent necessity of procuring, as far as possible, their neutrality in respect to the inchoation of measures, the whole virtual tendency of which is to destroy that power? Touch what spring of human action you please, you must touch at the same time the established system: touch the spring with any just and generous view of removing the pressure which that system has laid on its native elasticity, and you must at the same time challenge the hostility of that tremendous phalanx of priestly sages which wields an inscrutable literature for the express purpose of perpetuating the enthralment of the popular mind. However much the splendour of our political power may seem to have abashed these dark men, the fact is that their empire over the arts and understandings of the people has been, and is almost entirely, unaffected by it. With the Saga of Pompeii they say—‘The body to Cæsar, the mind to us’—a profound ambition suited to the subtle genius of their whole devices, and which I fear some of us commit the lordly absurdity of misinterpreting into impotency or indifference! Before we have set foot almost upon their empire, it is somewhat premature to question their resources