Page:James Thomason (Temple).djvu/178

 CHAPTER XI

Public Instruction and General Policy

Public instruction of the higher kinds was found by Thomason to have been fairly well set on foot in his Provinces, in fact excellent colleges existed at Benares, Bareilly, Delhi, Agra, and elsewhere; and evidently there would be no difficulty in founding middle-class schools in the principal towns. He rightly anticipated that superior institutions would be best established by private effort, to which grants-in-aid from the State might be accorded. The real desideratum for him was to establish schools in the villages for the mass of the people who lived by the land, under a system of what would be called nowadays elementary education.

He had inherited, as has been shown in chapter II, from his father, a love for education generally, whether superior or elementary. No man understood better than he the adaptation of Western knowledge to the Native mind. No man was more highly qualified than he to lead the Natives on in the way of learning, through their own classical languages. Nevertheless, he saw