Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/313

308 The absolute necessity of such a resolution will farther fully appear, if the territorial extent of the districts and the multitudinousness of the population be distinctly kept in view. It is not unusual, for the sake of popular illustration, to compare our Bengal zillahs to counties in Great Britain, and our thanas to parishes. The analogy may be allowed, if care be taken that it do not mislead, either as to extent or numbers. With two or three overgrown exceptions, counties and parishes in Great Britain are vastly inferior in extent and numbers to zillahs and thanas in Bengal. The latter resemble more the provinces and counties of Ireland—the Departments and Arrondissements of France—the Provinz or Regierungs-bezirk and Kreis of Germany; the Arrondissements and the Kreis being again subdivided respectively into communes and gemeindes, the lowest administrative units in these several kingdoms, somewhat corresponding to parishes in Great Britain and Ireland. Properly speaking, then, we have no such minute and convenient administrative unit as a commune, a gemeinde, or a parish, in Bengal. We have only provinces and counties—departments and arrondissements. Look at the Zillah of Rajshahi, which was fixed on for the commencement of Mr. Adam’s operations. It contains a population of about 1,500,000—a million and a half—that is, a population larger than that of the whole of Scotland at the time of the Reformation, and considerably in excess of that of the entire Principality of Wales even now. The zillah is subdivided into thirteen thanas, of which Nattore, the one selected for Mr. Adam’s more minute personal inquiries, contains a population of 195,296, or nearly two hundred thousand—that is, a population greatly exceeding, with two or three exceptions, the aggregate of every county in Scotland. What, then, shall we say as to the whole of Bengal and Behar, with their twenty-six zillahs and thirty-six millions of people? One man fit to extend his minute personal inquiries into the educational wants and supplies of every single family therein? Impossible.

Mr. Adam’s plan, topographically considered, being settled, how was he next to proceed with the details or individual items of desiderated information? The great object wanted, was exactly to ascertain the nature and amount of existing indigenous instruction—the nature and amount of the means of imparting it—together with the actual distribution of the different kinds and means of instruction among the different tribes and classes of a diversified people, and the different localities of a singularly productive if not richly variegated soil. A task this of easy accomplishment in the eyes of the unreflecting, who never allow