Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/190

176 all works, his Essays, which he wrote in English as an amusement for his leisure hours, are alone in everybody’s hands; but, notwithstanding this, the modern European literature will be found to have taken its great start at the time when the cultivation of the classical languages was at its height. To check the study of Latin at that period would have been to check the progress of knowledge, of taste, and of curiosity, which, descending lower and lower, at last gave rise to the admirable literature of the West. To check the study of English, in order to force that of the vernacular language, would have an equally bad effect upon the nascent literature of India. It would retard the process of national improvement by a fruitless endeavour to have that first, which ought, in the natural course of things, to come last: it would have the same effect on the increase of knowledge which the mistaken policy of some nations has on the increase of wealth, who, impatient to have manufactures before they come in their own time, divert a portion of their capital from the more profitable employment of agriculture to the less profitable one of manufactures.

There is, however, one mode in which the Government may, without running any risk of en-