Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 3.djvu/61

 school-master is learned in many sciences, but does not feel at home in Vemana’s verses ; and the simple rustic asks, 'what doth it profit a man to acquire so many sastrams but lose the soul of poetry’? Again, by bands of earnest workers, animated by various motives, the literary prose is being developed, at least in some of the Vernaculars, into a fit vehicle for cultured thought and sentiment. But it is a task weighed down with difficulties; and it merits generous encouragement from the University as well as the public. If modern learning is to be carried to the heart of the nation, it can be done only through the Vernaculars. Without a broad and well-laid basis of wide-spread Vernacular education, higher culture, restricted to a few, would, for national efficiency, mean something like the dwelling-place of Duessa—a mansion on a morass.—3. A former Convocation Address noted that the claims of studies relating to the industrial life of the community had been temporarily ‘waived in deference to the claims of pure learning’. But education along the lines of applied science is the