Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/97

Rh 150 to upwards of 300, and more teachers were still called for. The same thing also took place at Agra. These are not symptoms of a forced and premature effort, which, as the committee of 1824 justly observed, would have recoiled upon ourselves, and have retarded our ultimate success.

To sum up what has been said: the Hindu system of learning contains so much truth as to have raised the nation to its present point of civilization, and to have kept it there for ages without retrogading, and so much error as to have prevented it from making any sensible advance during the same long period. Under this system, history is made up of fables, in which the learned in vain endeavour to trace the thread of authentic narrative; its medicine is quackery; its geography and astronomy are monstrous absurdity; its law is composed of loose contradictory maxims, and barbarous and ridiculous penal provisions; its religion is idolatry; its morality is such as might be expected from the example of the gods and the precepts of the religion. Suttee, Thuggee, human sacrifices, Ghaut murder, religious suicides, and other such excrescences of Hinduism, are either expressly enjoined by it, or are directly deduced from the principles inculcated by