Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/100

86 voured quarter of the globe, and the particular claims of the English language as an instrument of Indian improvement have thus become a point of paramount importance. These claims have been thus described by who will be admitted to have made good his title to an opinion on the subject:—

“How then stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue; we must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate; it stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West; it abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions which, considered merely as narratives have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the com-