Page:Hints Relative To Native Schools (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.102605).pdf/93

Rh of their own language. The wretched schools they have in their towns and villages are so few, that on the average scarcely one man in a hundred will be found who can read a common letter. But the knowledge gained in these schools is so small that it does little more than serve to make darkness visible. Without books, without the vestige of a grammar in the common dialects, without the most limited vocabulary, what can they acquire even of their own language? They merely learn to trace the letters of the alphabet, to write a few names, and, as their highest accomplishment, to copy a meagre and ill-written letter. Hence when brought into life, numberless instances occur wherein their wretched writing and far more wretched orthography, almost the dictate of every man’s fancy render them quite unable to read each other’s hand. Hence too the perusal of books from which principles of integrity and uprightness might be imbibed, is quite out of the question. If there be any thing in, or in any other of their writers, which could preserve the tone of public morals, it is never brought within the reach of the common people. Printed books they have none, unless a copy of some book of the scriptures should have found its way among them. And as to manuscripts, they have scarcely one in prose; but if they possessed a multitude, their ignorance of their own language would render the perusal of an inaccurate and ill-written manuscript too formidable a task to be often attempted. Thus with a regular and copious language of their own, nearly all who are ignorant of the Sungskrit language, (which is not understood by one in ten thousand throughout India,) are in a state of ignorance not greatly exceeded by that of those savage hordes who have no written language, while numerous causes combine to sink them far below most savage nations in vice and immorality.

Add to this, that their knowledge of Arithmetic is scarcely less wretched. What avails their possessing treatises in Sungskrit both on Arithmetic and Geometry? from these the common people de-