Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/141

Rh The Mahommedan legal system was locked up in Arabic; the Hindu in Sanskrit; Persian was the language of official proceedings; English that of liberal education and of a great part of our judicial and revenue system all of these being independent of the common colloquial languages. If, therefore, a person learned only one foreign or dead language, it was impossible for him to qualify himself to take an efficient part in public business. If he learned several, his best years were wasted in the unprofitable task of studying grammar and committing vocabularies to memory. Persons were considered learned in proportion to the number of languages they knew; and men, empty of true knowledge and genius, acquired great reputations, merely because they were full of words. As great a waste of human time and labour took place in India under this state of things, as is caused in China by their peculiar system of writing. In one country, life was exhausted in learning the signs of words, and in the other in learning words themselves.

At first we gave decided encouragement to this false direction of the national taste. Our own attention was turned the same way. Oriental philology had taken the place of almost every other pursuit among our Indian literary men. The sur-