Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/126

112 Readiness in acquiring languages, which exists in such a strong degree in children, seems to exist also in nations which are still rising to manhood. No people speak foreign languages like the Russians and Hindus. Such nations are going through a course of imitation, and those qualities of mind upon which their success depends seem to be proportionately developed.

When we go beyond this point to the higher and more original powers of the mind, judgment, reflection, and invention, it is not so easy to pronounce an opinion. It has been said, that native youth fall behind at the age at which these faculties begin most to develope themselves in Englishmen. But this is the age when the young Englishman generally commences another and far more valuable education, consisting in the preparation for, and practice of some profession requiring severe application of mind; when he has the highest honours and emoluments opened to his view as the reward of his exertions, and when he begins to profit by his daily intercourse with a cultivated intellectual, and moral society. Instead of this, the native youth falls back on the ignorant and depraved mass of his countrymen; and, till lately, so far from being stimulated to further efforts, he was obliged to ask himself for