Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/214

 we see the openings to reform pointed out and a general hope of greater things for the future diffused among the people—and these are the very elements of national progress—we find that for all this the community is indebted to our University.

But while this movement has been going on in the world presided over by the University and directly in influenced by it, there has been a concurrent and and parallel movement no less astonishing. We have seen an extraordinary development of agriculture, the introduction of tea and coffee planting, the extension of improved cotton growth, a general stir and progress such as there never was before. We have also seen that remarkable expansion of the railway system, which has converted India into one of the countries best provided with great roads in the world. We have seen commerce developing itself on a scale which heretofore was unknown; and in the train of commerce have followed also banking and exchange on a great scale. Now all these material arts on which the genius and disciplined ability of many of our own students and graduates have been expended have been found to have beneath them, as in all arts and sciences, certain rules and principles which, having been gathered from particular instances, then form themselves a basis from which by inference new rules and new principles may be derived. The want is felt by degrees here as in other countries of a technological institution, which should gather up these results, satisfy these needs, and give us the training which our new circumstances require. The movement has been greatly aided and stimulated, no doubt, by the corresponding movement in England, for there, as here, it is felt that the competition of the world every day grows more keen, and that it is only by a perpetual striving and a thorough cultivation of the faculties that we are likely to keep our place, either in England or in India, in the race for competence and prosperity. In this very city we have seen the mill industry grow up, which makes Bombay one of the great manufacturing cities of the world, and here, especially, the want of technological instruction has been a growing want, which has made itself keenly felt and has been loudly expressed. Now comes an institution which, I trust, will supply that great want: nor let it be supposed for a moment that an institution of that kind need be deficient in the higher elements of intellectual cultivation. It is certainly true that technical instruction, when it is pursued on a scientific basis, affords exercise to the very highest powers of the intellect. If we follow out the development of any one of the great