Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/184

 industries can be set on foot for the employment of the surplus population? These are a few of the economic questions to the solution of which natives of the country trained in scientific knowledge and to accurate habits of thought should be able to contribute. With all these interesting subjects and pursuits opening and expanding before us and with freedom of speech and thought, one is disposed to envy the young scholar of India, his free and various opportunities for usefulness and activity in civil and political life.

Let me in conclusion, along with the promise of your future present a few words of caution to you graduates Words of 1884 and to all those before you, who in the long procession or years, have received the degrees of this University and gone out hence to encounter the struggle of life. You are living in a dawn of much promise of which no man can yet foresee the perfect day. Then realise how much in the future of your country depends upon yourselves and the character you have formed under the discipline of your colleges. If you are called on hereafter, as you may and will be, to think and speak and write on public affairs, let your participation therein be in the spirit of the great authors whom you have studied,—thoughtful, scrupulous, liberal and free from prejudice. Let me draw your attention to the words uttered lately at Poona by one whose great historical attainments entitle him to speak with high authority of the lessons of history—I mean the learned Principal of the Elphinstone College, who told you that you as an educated minority among illiterate masses are exposed to special temptations and dangers from which you can be protected only by habits of mental discipline and patient self-denial. Keep your minds free from exaggerated ideas and pretensions. Do not mar and nullify the great power and privilege of a free press by petulant and inaccurate criticism of public affairs. Let honest work in some of the fields of action which I have briefly indicated, and the patriot's singleness of purpose for the public good, abstract your minds from any craving for the personal notoriety which is so often mistaken for fame. Thus may you obey the charge which I have addressed to you, that ever in your life and conversation, you shew yourselves worthy of the degrees conferred upon you by this University—a University founded in a year of war and tumult, by a Government which revolution was impotent to divert from completing the beneficent work of which you enjoy the inheritance.