Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/27

 dent student, the Bombay University and its affiliated Colleges were not quite as old as their alumni. The rough and ready methods of the East India Company's Government were, by this time being gradually substituted by Institutions more imposing under the direct rule of the Queen-Empress. In matters educational, Colonel-Professors and Major-Directors were giving place to graduates from Oxford and Cambridge; and although this new University ware was not as a rule a very great improvement on the former military commodity, it was, at least, imbued with the atmosphere of the English academies. Howsoever opinions may differ as to the value of the knowledge Indian students acquired at these Institutions, one thing was certain that they were not slow to admire the gowns and caps of the sartorial Major-domoes, in whose orbits it was their destiny to fall.

Persons of parasitic psychology, whose main purpose is to make the present comfortable without a thought to the future may deride the idea of National Education. But those who can think for themselves are painfully aware of the disadvantages of imbibing foreign ideas through a foreign medium at an immature but impressionable time of life. The system of education transplanted from England to India by well-meaning administrators was itself faulty at the very foundation; and the immature graduates of English Universities who came out to India as custodians of the New learning were entirety innocent of India's storied past and the living present. They were quite ignorant of the dangers of directing the youthful energies of the children of shastris and pundits into the uncongenial