Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/41

 upper classes, how will it fare with the poor, with those who can neither read nor write, who seem condemned to perpetual ignorance, because it is hardly possible for them to hear a teacher's voice, and the written word is to them sealed by ignorance of the first elements of learning? "Would it not be better," it may be asked, "that all cost and pains which have been spent in equipping this one scholar with so many costly gifts had been divided so as to instruct hundreds of poor peasants in the simple arts of reading and writing?" I believe that to such questioners the true answer would be that experience shows that one such scholar accomplished, as I have supposed, will do more to promote the primary education of all around him than could possibly be effected by almost any sum of money simply spent in teaching the illiterate to read and write. We are too apt to forget that this work of primary education is not simply a matter of arithmetical calculation, or of the expenditure of a given sum of money. Were it so, a single decree of any Parliamentary grant would solve the question of popular education, and banish ignorance of at least the elements of learning for ever, but we know that it is not, and never can be so. We know how for years every civilized country in the Western world has laboured, not wholly in vain, but with at best imperfect success, to give to the mass of the people the first elements of education. It is not the want of money, but the want of human hearts and heads capable of applying that money intelligently to the work of teaching, which so long has kept, and will keep so large a proportion of the poorer class in every country unable to write or read. Let us consider where in England or in Germany would popular education be were it not for those who have themselves been educated at a University, or at schools which take their tone from the University? The landlords, the clergy of all denominations, the schoolmasters, the authors and editors, these classes are surely not unimportant agents in spreading primary or popular education. No man of refined education can stand unmoved by the spectacle of a people wholly in darkness. Unless he sat himself up within a barrier of entirely selfish enjoyment he must go forth and act the part of a teacher, and he will teach with an intelligent power a thousand-fold greater than can be applied by him who, however zealous in the cause, has himself no more than a perfect knowledge of the bare elements of learning. These are the reasons why it seems to me that it is a very superficial view of the effects of this University education to suppose that it is in any way antagonistic to the great cause of primary education. On the contrary, I