Page:General report on the public instruction in the lower provinces of the Bengal Presidency (1844-45).djvu/72

62 instance probably to satisfy the demand for admission, and in the second, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the supernumerary class. This is a most interesting class, entirely paying its own expences and shewing by a comparison with other classes, that the pay system has by no means yet reached to its proper limits.

It was formed under a supernumerary master, placed in a vacant room and was intended to receive children who could not otherwise be admitted. Hence it is in some sense a measure of what will be paid for education, when it can no longer be had for nothing. In it the average payment exceeds a rupee, and yet the boys are young, in fact the youngest in the college, a circumstance which may be supposed to diminish the willingness of their parents to pay. They would undoubtedly be more willing to pay four rupees for a boy in a high class than one rupee in the lowest. It is not improbable that the schools newly established in Chinsurah, by ex-students of the college, may interfere with this class; one of the children in it has already left it to join one of the new establishments, and such cases will, in the opinion of the Principal, occur more frequently in the other low classes as well as in this—nor is this, in his opinion, to be regretted. The college appears to him too large, even without a supernumerary class, when it is considered that many of the pupils are scarcely beyond the alphabets. “Children,” as Mr. in his third Report says, “should not go to college to learn the alphabet.”

Hence if any falling of in these classes should occur, it need not be attributed to the institution being held in less than that high degree of estimation by the native community which it has hitherto enjoyed, but to the existence of schools in the immediate neighbourhood of the college, containing together 350 boys. The means adopted to increase the payments will also have a slight tendency to keep down the increase in magnitude of the college. But, from circumstances of frequent occurrence to his predecessor and himself, he does not think that the extension of the pay system will have any very great effect in reducing the numbers in the college.

The conduct of those concerned in imparting instruction has been unexceptionable. As few of the native parents in this district speak English fluently, and as none of the European masters have a sufficient knowledge of Bengallee to enable them to enter native society under advantageous circumstances, it is evident that the best means, such as personal intercourse, are not available to the natives for the