Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/114

100 and the ingenuity of several able men was tasked to the utmost to defend a course of proceeding which had been adopted in spite of the declared sentiments of the court of directors and of common sense.

It was urged, in the next place, that it was downright spoliation to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which had previously been spent by the government in encouraging the study of Sanskrit and Arabic, but which were now directed to be employed in teaching English under the restrictions contained in the resolution of the 7th March 1835. To this it was replied that “the grants which are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature differ in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a sanatarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy: do we thereby pledge ourselves to keep a sanatarium there, if the result should not answer our expectations? We commence the erection of a pier: is it a violation of the public faith to stop the work, if we afterwards see reason to believe that the building will be useless? The rights of property are undoubtedly sacred; but nothing endangers those rights so much as the practice, now unhappily too com-