Page:Second Report on the State of Education in Bengal (1836).djvu/42

Rh account the superior respectability and aptness for business which those possess who have received a Persian education—an advantage, however, which is connected with the preference given to it in the courts. Some Hindu landholders and other respectable Natives have expressed to me a desire to have Persian instruction for their children, but they apparently had no other object than to qualify them to engage in the business of life, which, unhappily in their case, is for the most part identical with the business of the courts.

Upon the whole, apart from the courts, the Persian language has a very feeble hold upon this district, and it would not be difficult not merely to substitute English for it, but to make English much more popular. Some of the considerations by which Persian is recommended might be brought with much more force in favor of English, if it could be made more accessible, and the motives derived from other considerations which are in their nature untransferable are not such as should be encouraged and might be gradually made to lose their influence without doing any violence to popular feeling.

II. Elementary Domestic Instruction.—The number of families in which domestic instruction is given to the children is 1588. These families are found in 238 villages out of 485, the total number of villages in Nattore. I omitted to note at the commencement of the inquiry the number of children in each of these families, and I cannot, therefore, state with perfect accuracy the total number of children receiving domestic instruction; but after my attention had been attracted to this omission, I found that a very large majority had each only one child of a teachable age receiving instruction, a few had two, a still smaller number had three, and one or two instances were found in which four children of one family received domestic instruction. The number of families in which two or more children receive domestic instruction are comparatively so few that I cannot estimate the total average for each family at more than 1, which, in 1,588 families, will give 2,382 children who receive domestic instruction. It has before appeared that the number of children receiving elementary instruction in schools is 262; and the proportion of those who receive