Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/192

 time. But as we have now advanced a little further in the science of municipal government, I hope the project may at last be carried out. Last year I somewhat briefly and imperfectly directed the attention of the students before me to the opportunities open to them of developing the resources of their country by scientific research and the application of science to industries. I say further to-day that this appears to me to be the appropriate direction of the widest current of our public education, because by far the greatest part of Indian students are, like the Englishmen in India, of the class of working men. As the great majority of them have to contribute their labour in some special calling to the public stock, the best they can do is to promote their country's prosperity by directing a skilled intelligence to extract from nature, through science, the services of her means and agents of material progress. It is quite true that the University may direct the use of scientific method to the study of languages and philosophy as well as to the study of the natural sciences. There is room for science of both kinds; but I think that there is more need for the latter, and that specialism in the study of the natural sciences is more useful for the young men of this day than general culture, and wholesome as well as useful. Science and art applied to invention and production pay no regard to distinctions of nationality or clime. They choose as their most honoured agents those who are best educated, whose natural taste and aptitude have been best cultivated for the work to be done. The competition in the world's industrial school gives the prize to those results of labour which derive the highest excellence from enlightened skill and the fine artistic sense, and to the peoples who most assiduously cultivate those faculties. There is no room there for the assertion of an equality which cannot prove itself by facts and achievements. That arena is quite apart from baseless jealousies of class and race, their passions and profitless strife. The competition is waged under conditions likely to promote the modesty which is an element of wisdom and the reverence which Goethe calls the soul of all religion. With these elementary remarks I leave a great subject, of which I am glad to call myself a student, hoping that at next Convocation there may be a record of something done in this matter.