Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/498

 I have sometimes smiled to see sagacious advice given you by some of your own people outside this Presidency, as to the expediency of using both Conservatives and Liberals for the good of India, without allowing yourselves to be entangled in our contentions. Even so I have thought does the prudent and reflective moth propose to use the candle.

Though, however, I think that for you to meddle with our home politics is to reap the whirlwind, while to play at politics here is to Plough the sand, I trust that a great many of you will find most honorable and useful spheres of activity, in connection with the recent development of local self-government in this Presidency—the mother, I think, I may say, of local self-government in its modern Indian form. I cannot tell you how anxious I am to see this strike deep root amongst your people, but it can only do so if your most educated men bend their minds to the often tiresome, but always supremely important, tasks of multiplying roads and schools, spreading vaccination, seeing after rest-houses for travellers, planting avenue trees, or, to put all in one phrase, "in extending civilization," for it is in these and such things, not in the institutions that catch the eye, and get written about in the ordinary histories, that civilization consists. Large parts even of the island of Great Britain were hardly civilized in the year 1800, and even in our own time Mr, Disraeli wrote of civilization, as being confined to England, France, and the course of a single river, meaning, thereby, the Ehine. The remark required modification, but had much truth in if. The object of all who work local self-government should be to extend what he meant by civilization all over South India.

Let every man try to make his town or village the best drained, the best educated, the cleanest and the healthiest in the District, with the hardest and best shaded roads. Such work is not political in the sense in which that word is usually employed, but it is of untold importance to the Polis, the community.

Get wealth, get material civilization. These are the two maxims, which I wish to impress upon you in this part of my address. You will soon see that I do not consider that man lives by bread alone, or that even widely diffused physical well-being is the last word of human progress. There is probably no one who ever addressed you, who holds more distinctly an opposite opinion; but it is madness not to recognize the limitations of existence, or to try to leap over our own shadows. All schemes of world-bettering by raising the condition of the masses, and spreading