Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/299

Gujarat Educational Conference precious life, what a great national saving it would be.

The excessive burden of having to learn through a foreign medium has sapped the strength, enthusiasm and vitality of our young men. Sickly and pale they can at best be mere imitators. All power of initiative, originality and enterprise; courage, discrimination and fearlessness dwindle away as years pass by. What they commence they cannot carry out. The few that show some spirit die young. The negroes of South Africa are a stalwart and sober race. Social evils like child-marriage are unknown amongst them but they too have suffered like ourselves because they accepted Dutch as the medium of their education. They have grown impotent imitators of the west. With the loss of their mother tongue they lost all vigour and originality. We who have received English education cannot measure the loss we have sustained. If we consider what little hold we have upon our masses we can have some idea of that loss. We are proud of a Bose or a Ray amongst us but I daresay that had we received instruction through the vernacular for the last fifty years we would have had amongst us 179