Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/544

 example, you can urge upon the ryot the advantage of abandoning his primitive tools for those modern improvements which are now placed within his reach, and of carrying out scientific suggestions as to rotation of crops and dressing the soil; you can explain the object of sanitary regulations and the importance of obeying them; the necessity of precaution against infectious diseases; the benefits of vaccination; the advantages of resorting to the hospital when sick, especially in cases of epidemic. You can interpret between those who make the law and those who have to obey the law. Education and contact with educated minds and the ruled. enable you to understand matters which are a mystery to others not having your opportunities, and which as a mystery are feared. You must lull to rest those suspicions which the uneducated ever feel when something new and unfamiliar is proposed. You must carry that lamp of learning of which we spoke into the caves of superstition and ignorance, casting its beams into every cranny and crevice, and show to the peoples that the grim shapes which terrify them so much are nought but phantoms of their own imagining, things of darkness that fade away on the approach of light.

And while thus correcting misapprehension and error in others, do not fall into like error yourselves. Reflect that though matters which seem an enigma to the villager are by reason of education simple to you, there may yet be other matters beyond your grasp also. Therefore when some policy of Government runs counter to your wishes and ideas, pause before ascribing illiberal motives. You may see one side of a subject quite clearly and think you have mastered it; yet there may be other sides entirely hidden from your eye of which you dream not. Be cautious therefore in assuming a measure to be wrong because you can see no good in it, or right because you can see no harm in it. Do not fall into the dangerous mistake of looking with suspicion on the motives of people who hold opinions contrary to your own. Here again you suffer from bad advisers. From platform and magazine self-dubbed "friends of India" encourage you to ask for this or that concession, and to think yourselves ill-used if it is not immediately granted. But these persons are not your true friends. Seek your true friends rather among those who have proved their friendship by heaping on you material benefits and privileges, and when you feel inclined to murmur at a refusal to accept your views turn as a corrective to a consideration of what you already enjoy. Think of your material benefits—call up the India of a hundred years back, a hotbed of picturesque insanitation, the absence of communications,