Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/69

 gentlemen of the Senate, to the Reports of the late Board of Education, and of the Director of Public Instruction, to the Reports of the various Missionary Institutions and Educational societies, and to our own Calendars. Due preparation was made for the University; and the University has given a» great impulse to the higher education in all our provinces. It has done more than this. It has introduced a great improvement in the quality of that education. The books prescribed embrace the literature and science of the West and East, without those eliminations in deference to prejudice and fear of change which were too often formerly made, especially in the Government seminaries. The consequences are the extension of the knowledge of what is of most importance, a comparison of the different courses of thought and discussion and historical representation, the generation of a more catholic and tolerant spirit, the extension and improvement of the native press and native authorship; the advancement of popular education, embracing that of females, so long neglected, the awakening of salutary inquiry about the duty, the deliverance and the destiny of man, and the commencement and progress of important reforms in the Indian community, having respect both to the present life and that which is to come. With reference to these matters, I was struck with a remark made to me a few years ago by a most acute and observant native gentleman, one of the first Fellows of our University, the late Mr. Jagannath Shankarshet. "We must be prepared," he said, "to take the natural consequences of education as well as the gift itself." What is here witnessed is perhaps more conspicuously revealed in another of the sister presidencies, I mean that of Bengal. I do not specially allude to any new religious organizations which, have been there formed, on which I do not wish, to make any observations in this place, either approbatory or condemnatory. Let us remember that India is an empire with various tribes and tongues of mutual peculiarities and even uncongenialities, and not a single homogeneous and consolidated nation. It has several distinct and marked centres of diffusive illumination and civilization. Among these Calcutta, the capital of the North-West Provinces, Lahore, Bombay, and Madras are the chief. Let Calcutta and its acute, ingenious, and in intellectual life not inactive Babus (I have no sympathy with, the exaggerated and distorted caricature of them made by the great Macaulay) act vigorously on Bengal, Behar, Tirahut and Orissa and the interesting and but recently appreciated sub-Himalayan provinces lying to its north and north-east. Let Allahabad, aided by Delhi and Oude, act effectively on the great