Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/340

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position has its responsibilities as well as its advantages, and the greater the advantages, so much the more weighty are the obligations which they entail. It is for you to be the interpreters to your countrymen of the principles and of the knowledge which you have acquired in the course of your academical studies, of the training, moral and intellectual, which you have received; to prove by your conduct in the affairs of every-day life, whether your lot be cast in the Court or in the Cutchery, in the mart or on the farm, that the studies to which you have devoted yourselves have had an ennobling and purifying influence upon your characters, that they have taught you to love truth and honor, to eschew all that is mean and selfish, and to be guided in all the actions of your lives by a prevailing and constraining sense of duty.

It is sometimes said that a wide separation has taken place between that comparatively small section of the native Community who have been educated through the medium of the English language and the masses of their countrymen, that the former have become denationalized, and that they do not form that link, which it was hoped they would have constituted, between the European Governors of the country and the great mass of the population. Whether this be the case or not at the present time, it is clear that it must be so eventually, if the learning of the West shall continue to be confined to those who are able to acquire it through the medium of what must ever be an unknown tongue to the millions in this land. Surely, therefore, it is the bounden duty of every man who is interested in native progress, to do what in him lies in stimulating the diffusion of sound learning through the medium of the vernacular languages, and in helping forward the creation of a pure vernacular literature. In this latter object the University has a right to look for active co-operation from her graduates ; for if such a vernacular literature as this country needs, is ever to be formed, it must be the work of men who, like yourselves, combine solid attainments in English literature and science with a thorough knowledge of the languages of India.

There is another sphere of duty for which the University of Madras desires to enlist the services of her graduates, and upon which she hopes that some of you, who have this day been enrolled as her members, will not be unwilling to enter. I refer to the profession of a schoolmaster. It is clear that if the elementary instruction of the great body of the people of this land is to