Page:Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 & 1838).djvu/531

460 it seems obvious that such a bond of connection between them and us must be of the highest advantage to the Government.

The effect of all these measures, if systematically prosecuted, would be to make the native soldiers intelligent instruments of rule, wielded in proportion to their intelligence with greater ease and with greater effect. Such an education would tend to emancipate the sepoys from the sinister influence of brahmans, mollas, and faqirs, and to identify them in feeling and in principle with their European officers and rulers; and it would furnish Government with commissioned native officers—a class in whom the men are well known to place their confidence—whose knowledge of our language and participation in our civilization would afford a sure guarantee for their fidelity. Finally, a native soldier thus instructed, either proceeding on leave of absence to his village or retiring from the service for life, would carry with him both the feeling of attachment to his English rulers, and the will and the power, to diffuse the knowledge and the civilization of which he has been made a sharer.

My chief object in this Section is to re-call attention to recommendations proceeding from the highest authorities which do not appear to have received all the consideration they deserve.

Lord Moira, in the Minute of 1815, to which I have had occasion repeatedly to refer, speaking of the state of public tuition in the principal towns, adds—“In these towns will also be found the same medium scale of education for the class of shop-keepers, artificers, and laborers as in the country villages, but in these towns and principally in the chief station of the zillah, and in the neighborhood of our jails, will be found a numerous population which seems to call for the particular attention of Government. I allude to the offspring of mendicants and vagrants who, nurtured in idleness and vice, are destined to recruit the ranks of the professional thieves infesting all great cities. Houses of industry for the education, employment, and refor-