Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/496

 We hear much talk about "leading the people of India" and all manner of crack-brained or interested quacks, European and others, will be increasingly ready to "lead" them by books, speeches, and anonymous articles.

My advice to the people of India is, to be led by those of their own race, who, being men of ripe experience and proved ability, have imbibed what is best of the wisdom that Europe can teach, without breaking away from all their old moorings, and I could not mention any name which better illustrates the kind of leading, to which I should commend them, than that of the distinguished Judge I have just mentioned.

One of the many important subjects, to which he urged you to attend, addressing you with an authority to which no European could aspire, was the home teaching of women. "Without it," he said, "the education of the women of this country cannot be sufficiently liberal, for, from one cause or another, girls are withdrawn from schools a little too soon. All of you should endeavour to secure the benefit of home-teaching to such young women as may come under your protection and guardianship, and I have no doubt that the prejudice against it will wear away in the same manner in which it has worn away in relation to girls receiving any education at all." I remember walking one day with an eminent Italian in the streets of a European capital, when a very useless person, bearing a great historic name, who had had a distinguished father, and a bad mother, passed us: "Les races se feminisent"— Races tend to take after the women—said my companion. The late Surgeon-General, addressing you in 1884, made some suggestive remarks on this subject. There is, he said, considerable danger, if there is great disparity in mental development between the father and the mother, that the intellectual powers of the ofEspring will rather follow the mother's than the father's type.

I should like to see the educational advance of South India more uniform—I should like to see both female and primary education moving a little quicker. Nothing is more keenly interesting to those Europeans in this country, whose duty it is to think, not of gaining cheap applause by repeating favourite Shibboleths, but by doing the best they can for your welfare, than to see the way in which practices and ideas, which are separated in the evolution of humanity by thousands of years, jostle each other in your society. I have received, within a few hours, two documents, one setting