Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/531

 ever be forgiven, slovenliness and dirt are more serious offences. Lines running at all kinds of angles with the horizontal, blots, smudges, and smears in profusion, erasures and alterations countless; these are characteristics of at least half your papers, and they might all be avoided with care and thought. This is an intolerable fault—reform it altogether.

In the terms of the by-law providing for this address, it is my duty to exhort you to conduct yourselves suitably unto the position to which, by the degrees conferred upon you, you have attained. The closer these lines are followed, the better. They seem to preclude anything in the shape of a disquisition on education, and indeed elaborate argument would in present circumstances be quite out of place. A tropical afternoon, this vast hall the acoustic difficulties of which are almost insurmountable, in which modulation of the voice is impossible, and in which the slightest movement or noise prevents your neighbours from hearing the speaker, the sea-breeze blowing strong through open casements, and the league long roller murmuring sullen a few yards to windward, these are conditions that demand plain words plainly spoken. I shall therefore merely give you from the vantage ground of age and experience some practical advice as to the conduct of your lives—advice much needed m these days, not only because various forces are at work to unsettle your minds and to fill them with false ideas, but also because you have as a class been lately placed in a difficult position, one that craves wary walking. You have book learning, your presence here to-day proves it: perseverance you have, your presence here to-day proves it: but you have also faults, and it is only fair to say that they are partly due to the treatment you have received these many years past. Ever since the higher education began in this Presidency, (and probably the remark applies equally to other parts of India), you have out of mistaken kindness been allowed your own way to an injudicious extent, notably in such matters as absence from school, promotion to forms for which you are not yet ripe, leaving one master for another out of petty whim, and it has been the fashion in certain quarters to ignore, and deprecate criticism on, your shortcomings. The natural result is that faults which might have been and should have been nipped in the bud have developed and flourished: and now of a sadden hard things are said of you, and these faults are pointed at and commented upon with a shaking of the head as though they were a new growth, as though their existence had