Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/220

 and you, still younger, who are to be graduates hereafter, that I would most of all desire to have thoroughly saturated with all the beneficial influence that a University can impart to its children. We live at the time of a momentous confluence and conflict of ideas, principles, and interests. You will probably have to take your part in a profound moral strife; but if that part is a noble one, you may rest assured of abundant sympathy The establishment of the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, which will make a new departure in the educational system of Bombay and of India, will stand also, like this University, as a striking and permanent sign of our readiness to admit and welcome every duly accredited addition to the means of advancing the moral and material welfare of the community. It is a wedding by which we bring a new sister into the family without abating one jot of our love and reverence for the members who were there before. The literature in which we delighted aforetime is still dear to us; the rigorous laws of mathematical science still command our reverence and admiration. But we think that while we keep room for our possible Newtons, Wordsworths, and Macaulays, we may find a place also for our Faradays and Darwins. We may hold out hands of fellowship to an Indian Watt or Arkwright, a Stephenson or Bessemer, and strive by mastering the principles which their genius anticipated to make the path smoother for new conquests of nature. When I see my beloved country seated majestically in her centre of empire, yet thus diffusing the highest blessings she herself enjoys to all who will accept them in this great dependency, I feel myself filled, I confess, with a patriotic pride, which no tales of mere victory could inspire. To her, and her alone, I feel those fine lines of Claudian are applicable:—

Hæc est in gremio victos quae sola recepit Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit Matris non dominæ ritu ; civesque vocavit Quos domuit.

All you are invited to come in and realize these blessings of a peaceful and beneficent dominion, and share the pride of a common citizenship with the great men whose writings have formed the nurture of your adolescence. But more, you are called on to go forth from this institution as apostles and interpreters to your countrymen in this generation and the next of the vivifying influence by which in our own day Europe has been renovated. The historical glory of a great civilization glows behind you; the rising splendour of an enlarged nationality, and of a new intellectual world is before you. You may well be stirred with noble emotion at the sight of where you are and what you have