education all his life, while an ignorant or half-literate stripling pursues his special education; but every man, high or low, noble or grovelling, receives some education or other up to the moment when he sinks into his grave. What we call experience in worldly phraseology is nothing but special education, and we see in the progress made in experience by the professional plodder, the steady but imperceptible progress in special education-the shroff or the banya in his expertness of shop chicaneries, the karkoon in his art of collection, the kazee in drawing in thickly the veil of ignorance, and the dewan or the kotwal in his watchfulness;-every professional man receives a special education, in every little concern of business he transacts, not the less steadily and progressively than the student does his general instruction, by reading and discoursing, because unconscious and unper

ceived.

If this view be right, as we have no doubt it is, then it is evident that in India there is no general education in its strict sense; for as yet education has been confined to that class of the population which either forces or induces the majority of boys to leave the school or college

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215

so soon as they have had such a smattering of English reading, writing, and arithmetic as enables them to obtain employment as writers or accountants; indeed, it is not likely that they would prefer what would seem to them a present evil for a future good; and even if they wished, the calls of the family upon the labour of all its hands are too urgent to allow of a gratification of their desire. The Indian Government so shamefully neglects all statistics that we do not know even our own numbers; little, therefore, can we venture to calculate exactly the proportion which the boys who go up to a completion of their studies bear to those who are either satisfied with or compelled to be content with a mere smattering of learning. But being a little in the habit of keeping a diary, we will transcribe here a few vague results arrived at by ourselves. Of 168 boys admitted with us into the English department, ten entered the Elphinstone College, of whom one has just finished its entire curriculum, and two are still with their studies; two joined the Grant Medical College, and have come out as graduates, and one is prosecuting his studies for the civil service in England: thus making the magnifi

cent number of thirteen out of 168! Of 143 boys of the batch in the following half-year, nine have entered the Elphinstone and one the Grant Medical Colleges, and they are yet prosecuting their respective studies; and of 156 boys admitted immediately before the first noticed batch, only six entered the college; but none stayed out its entire course, and in each of these three batches barely one-fourth the number remained to finish the education of the lower school of the Elphinstone Institution* ! These are the results in Bombay, where people are so well-to-do and enlightened; but the case in the mofussil is most disheartening, as out of about two hundred schools and upwards dispersed over the country, it is only some years that we get two, three, or four boys at the most into our college. From these imperfect, because private, statistics, we come to calculate the proportion of boys, who go up to a completion of their higher course, to those who fall off only with a smattering, to be barely eight per cent.; and if * Of the class of 28 boys trained by the writer of these pages during the past year or year and a half in his late posionly three joined the

tion as the head master of a seminary,

college, the rest having all entered the world as profession al young men; so great is the decadence of boys from a class.

PRIVATE STATISTICS.

217

allowance is to be made for the perfect apathy shown in the Native purgunnahs, and even cities, in the interior of the country, we will scarcely be wrong if we take two per cent. as the general estimate in this case for our Presidency. We are not in possession of estimates for the other Presidencies; but perhaps the case is not very much improved anywhere; so that, in one sense, the Government have begun their education with such a class as are occupied in receiving merely a special education for their profession. Void of means, they are unable to prove very beneficial instruments of reform to the lower orders of the people; and as for their own progress, we have again the mournful question to inquire-have we a single man of talent or genius to compare with any one of the commonest or lowest individuals who have raised the British intellect to its present proud position in the van of all that is ennobling? Had Government begun with the upper and richer classes in their scheme of implanting European civilisation and polish on the soil of this country, the extravagant expenses incurred in giving the higher education could have been spared, and after making the beginning they could easily have demanded

self-supporting institutions from our countrymen, if they desired to induct themselves into the higher branches of literature and science. We should have had by this time a rich crop of well-grounded students, devoted to learning and literary investigations in after life; while the heavy expenses, unnecessarily and without any very beneficial results, spent in educating indolent and worldly-minded boys, could have been diverted to elevating the lower mass of the people by grounding them in rudimentary knowledge and moral inculcations, so necessary for the well-being both of the people and the Government themselves. In England the higher education is to be had only after an expense of eight or ten thousand rupees for each boy, while the rudimentary national education is given for nothing in every village and street; and there can be no reason why it is not so in India. There can be no greater delusion than that of excusing this anomalous procedure on the score of the different circumstances of the two countries, inasmuch as the experiment has never been tried. Perhaps there was the difficulty of class pride and reserve, so common with eastern nations, to contend with; but by keeping the colleges