Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/368

Rh whoever has given a patient attention to the cautious inductive process by which these fearful results have been obtained, must feel satisfied that they cannot be far wide of the truth. Let, then, these terrific summations be kept ringing in the ears of our statesmen at home and abroad, aye, and of the whole sovereign British public, till some educational movement be originated, somewhat commensurate in its nature and extent with the clamant necessities of the living and moving masses of ignorance around us. For, viewed even as a case of simple ignorance or blank vacuity, who can, without painful emotion, contemplate its vastness—its almost boundlessness of expanse? Who, that has in any adequate degree realized the astounding fact, can maintain anything like silence, when he reflects that, in the two provinces of Bengal and Behar alone, the amount of ignorance is numerically far more extensive than it would be if, in the British isles, including England, Scotland, and Ireland, with their several insular appendages, not a single man, woman, or child, could be found, endowed with the humblest of all scholastic attainments—the attainment that would capacitate them simply to read, cypher, or write!

Mr. Adam himself, albeit not a man over much given to the melting or emotive mood, seems to have felt something like an indescribable sensation taking possession of his soul when, looking down from the high tower of his educational survey, he gazed at the wide waste of utter sterility, intellectual and moral, that stretched out in all directions around him. In summing up the details of his first report on the educational statistics of the thana Nattore in the district of Rajshahi, he thus gives vent to the uncontrollable feelings which had gained the ascendancy over his usually cool and phlegmatic temperament:—“The conclusions to which I have come on the state of ignorance both of the male and female, the adult and the juvenile population of this district, require only to be distinctly apprehended in order to impress the mind with their importance. No declamation is required for that purpose. I cannot, however, expect that the reading of the report should convey the impression which I have received from daily witnessing the mere animal life to which ignorance consigns its victims, unconscious of any wants or enjoyments beyond those which they participate with the beasts of the field—unconscious of any of the higher purposes for which existence has been bestowed, society has been constituted, and government is exercised. I am not acquainted with any facts which permit me to suppose that, in any other country subject to an enlightened government, and brought into direct and immediate contact with European civilization, in an equal population, there