Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/514

 no matter what were his abilities, or his application, lost five clear years of life, before he entered on his profession, thanks to the hopeless idiotcy of the system through which we were all put. I have taken comparatively little interest in English educational questions for some years back, but, from 1861, when I got the then Government to appoint the first Commission to enquire into our Public Schools till within a year or two of my leaving home, I took a very active part in their discussion, in and out of Parliament. During that time there was a great deal of improvement; but still the old follies stood back to back, and sold their lives dearly.

Here, however, I find little in our system to criticize. It is filled with the modern spirit, and, whenever a change is wanted, and is likely to be acceptable to those concerned, a scratch of the pen does more than years of weary iteration and reiteration of common sense can do to break through, in the old country, the cake of custom, let alone to overpower the resistance of the craftsmen of Ephesus.

And now, gentlemen, I think I have said to you, and, through you, to the youth of Southern India, all that I had it in my mind to say. My days in this country are numbered, but I shall continue to watch with the greatest interest the future of the Madras University. It has done good service up to this time, but there has perhaps not been much in its work, very unlike the work of its sister Universities at Calcutta and Bombay. It has been mainly an institution for the testing by West Aryans of the intellectual powers and educational progress of Southern Brahmins, that is, of persons of pure or mixed East Aryan blood.

All this is highly commendable, and useful. No one has a greater respect than I have for our Brahmins. Of them that may be truly said, which was said so well of Pericles:

They must always occupy a most important place in a society, presided over by the Aryans of the West, because their place is indicated by their possession of a large share of those intellectual powers, in virtue of which the West Aryan himself holds paramount sway.

But to have a University merely to do what, in these Railway days, Bombay could do almost as well, would be a rather humble ambition. What must ever differentiate this University from all other Universities is, that it is placed in the midst of a huge Dravidian population.