Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/117

Rh be confined to the capital and to one or two great towns.

To this I answer, that, instead of two or three, there are already forty institutions scattered throughout the country; that the means of obtaining a liberal education have thus been brought into everybody’s own neighbourhood; and that the number of young men belonging to every class of society, and to every part of the Bengal provinces, who now profit by our seminaries, necessarily greatly exceeds what used to be the case under the plan of having a few expensive colleges at which the students as well as teachers received salaries. Hundreds of boys are now cultivating our literature in Assam, Arrakan, Tenasserim, and other frontier provinces, which did not send a single student to the colleges at Calcutta and Benares.

In India poverty is not the only obstacle to the education of children at a distance from their parents. The means of communication from place to place are slow and inconvenient; a journey of one or two hundred miles appears to a native the same formidable undertaking that it did to our ancestors in the time of Queen ; and, above all, the mutual confidence which leads Englishmen to trust the entire management of their