Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/390



that ignorance is a highly expensive luxury, and that India, having only fifty millions a year and a great deal to do with them, cannot afford to be ignorant. It is "the curse of God;" it costs lives, it costs money, it costs happiness. Men, when first the curtain rises upon the stage of history, are wretched, trembling beings, a rather inferior sort of wild beasts, snatching a precarious livelihood from shell-fish or berries, exposed to untold hardships, brutalized by the most degrading customs, frequently exterminated in the unequal conflict with disease, misery and wild animals more powerful and courageous than themselves. By slow and painful degrees the race mounts up and culminates at last in the fully civilized man. Each step in the ascent is a piece of knowledge, a further acquaintance with the working of the world's machinery and the rules according to which the world around us proceeds, and so a better mastery over natural results.

Whenever we violate the laws of nature, whether intentionally or not, we suffer at once. For half the ills of life there is a remedy or a protection could we only find it. Take the simplest of all matter, the water we drink. Calcutta was at one time the perennial home of cholera, one of the fountain heads from which that fell disease constantly started to devastate mankind. The water available for drinking was, every scientific man declared, sufficient to dispose everyone to disease, and to spread, if not to originate it. A supply of absolutely pure water was brought in. After a great deal of discussion the Brahmins decided that it was not irreligious to drink it. What was the result ? The very first year the deaths from cholera sank to less than half the number of the previous year and to very little more than to half what had ever been known in the very healthiest year on record. And a corresponding diminution occurred in other cognate diseases. Much the same was experienced in Bombay, and I have no doubt, though happily we have no cholera here, that a similar improvement in the public health will be experienced here. But these are only three among all the thousands of cities and towns in India, and in many of them, Delhi is one I remember, the death-rate is awfully high, and the cause has been distinctly traced by men of science to impure water. Generally you may be sure that wherever you have a town population, drinking out of wells, a considerable percentage of them is poisoned every year, and a still larger percentage condemned to the misery of enfeebled health. This is a needless waste of life to be debited to ignorance. Then I will take another matter, small-