Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/118

104 children to persons whom they often know only by reputation, is at a very low ebb in India. No native who could afford to give his son an education of any sort at home would think of sending him to be brought up among strangers. It was once proposed to educate the public wards at Calcutta, where the government itself would have had proper care taken of them, but the relations of the wards so unanimously and decidedly objected to the plan that it was at once abandoned. They had no objection, however, to their being educated under the superintendence of the government officers at their own provincial towns, with which they are in almost daily communication, and at which the young men might have resided, often in their own town houses, under the care of the old servants of the family. Besides this, the colleges under the stipendiary system were regarded by all classes as charitable institutions; and this alone would have prevented the native gentry from sending their sons to them. They were filled with the children of indigent persons, a very small proportion of whom came from a distance; and these last, even if they had learned any thing worth communicating, which they did not; would have been too few, too uninfluential, and too much isolated from the rest of