Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/170

158 ability, but in his being sooner fitted for actual duty. Undoubtedly, if two men go out to Calcutta so unequal in their knowledge of native languages, or in the preparation for that knowledge, that one can begin work in six months, while the other takes nine, there is an important difference between them. But what is the obvious mode of rewarding the differences? Not, I should think, by pronouncing one a higher man in the scale of the competition, but by giving him some money-prize in proportion to the redemption of his time for official work.

Now, as regards the second kind of languages, those that are supposed to carry with them all the valuable indirect consequences that we have just reviewed. There are in the Civil Service scheme five such languages—the two ancient, and three modern. They are kept there, not because they are ever to be read or spoken in the service, but because they exercise some magical efficacy in elevating the whole tone of the human intellect.

If I were discussing the Indian Civil Service in its own specialties, I would deprecate the introduction of extraneous languages into the competition for this reason, that the service itself taxes the verbal powers more than any other service. I do not think that Lord Macaulay and his colleagues had this circumstance fully in view. Macaulay was himself a glutton for language; and, while in India, read a great quantity of Latin and Greek. But he was exempted from the ordinary lot of the Indian civil servant; he had no native languages to acquire and to use. If a man both speaks and writes in good English, and converses familiarly in several Oriental dialects, his language-memory is sufficiently well taxed, and if he carries with him one European language besides, it is as much as belongs to the fitness of things in that department.

My proposal, then, goes the length of excluding all these five cultivated languages from the competition, notwithstanding the influence that they may be supposed to have as general culture. In supporting it, I shall assume that everything that can be said in their favor is true to the letter; that they assist us in our language, that they cultivate logic and taste, that they exemplify universal grammar, and so on. All that my purpose requires is to affirm that the same good ends may be attained in other ways; that Latin, Greek, etc., are but one of several instruments for instructing us in English composition, reasoning, taste, and so on. My contention, then, is that the ends themselves are to be looked to, and not the means or instruments, since these are very various. English composition is, of course, a valuable end, whether got through the study of Latin, or through the study of English authors themselves, or through the inspiration of natural genius. Whatever amount of skill and attainment a candidate can show in this department should be valued in the examination for English: and all the good that Latin has done for him would