Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/213

 reflects the great movements of the thought of the world. The very fact that a man is great in literature implies that he has penetrated deeper than others into the human faculty and human nature, and that he has been able to select for us those types of character for imitation which we may recognise as leading us on to the cultivation of the higher parts of our nature and the gradual suppression of those which are more ignoble. For all this and more literature is an instrument of education which cannot be surpassed. The history of the world, and more especially the history of our own country, shows that instruction based on classical literature has been sufficient for generations, and even for centuries, to train up for the English Senate, and in the public life of the country, a series of men who were wanting in none of the attributes of greatness and statesmanship. But in this country, too, we have seen the beneficial results of this classical and mathematical training. We have disseminated all over this Presidency, and to a circuit far beyond this Presidency, our engineers, who are evolving and developing a new the resources of the country. We have sent to the remotest towns of this Presidency physicians, who carry with them not only a rational practice of medicine, but take with them also that method of viewing the facts of nature, which in itself is an instruction to all who become acquainted with them. They are reproducing and repeating in this country the course which was taken by their great predecessors in Europe at the awakening of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, when the physicians were the great leaders of advancing thought, and were opening the way to the great development of the inductive sciences. Then, again, in the field with which I am more nearly connected myself, the field of the law, have we not diffused through this Presidency, and a region of far greater extent, the noble principles of the English law? Have we not sent out gentlemen, who, having been first well trained in general literature, have been able to make their profession and persons well respected, and who being thoroughly well trained in the law, which is the very life of English institutions, have laid the foundation amongst their own people for an indefinite progress, political and social, in the future. This our University has accomplished in the past, and, I think, we must say that when we find journalism also so developed, and when we find the teaching profession so well filled in this Presidency, our University has no reason to hang down its head and say: "This we have done, but we have not done enough." When we see the general powers and capacities of people widely expanded and elevated; when we see institutions fairly, though frankly, criticised; when