Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/112

98 the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?

“The words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear them out, and other words follow which seem to be quite decisive on the other side. This lac of rupees is set apart, not only for ‘reviving literature in India,’ the phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also ‘for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories,’—words which are alone sufficient to authorize all the changes for which I contend.”

Both the court of directors and the Indian government took this view of the subject at the period when measures were first taken to carry the intentions of the British parliament into effect, and those intentions were certainly likely to have been better understood at that time than at any subsequent period. The Indian government in their instructions to the committee appointed to administer the funds made no allusion to the