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and such like showy things, and a great deal of waste in sleep and useless chat. The consequences from a system of this debasing character are obvious as well as pernicious. If these petty objects and useless pursuits occupy the time and engage the attention of every mother in an Indian family; if, beyond these, her mental vision never penetrates, and her heart never flows; if, amidst all her trappings and decorations, which she so much revels in and centres her happiness in possessing, she can never even acknowledge the Source from whence all things spring; if the affairs of the kitchen, the bonds of relationship, and the extending of connections, and temporal advancement of her children, are the sole objects and purposes of her existence, and complete the whole circumference of her actions and thoughts-then it can never be that an Indian son enjoys the real blessing and comforts of an early domestic education in all its varied extent and useful

ness.

It will be urged, and Europeans are ready to believe, that the picture given above of female character in India was true some five-andtwenty years ago; but now that female education has been working so steadily in Bombay

and Calcutta during the last quarter of a century, it must materially have altered. But this is placing too much confidence in the rosecoloured reports of an organised system of hypocrisy, which a few interested men, with a sturdy pride, worthy of a better cause, try to perpetuate. The system of education imparted among the Parsees may, we presume, be taken as a fair sample-rather a better one than any else-of female enlightenment in India: better, we say, because Parsees are so much ahead of all Indian tribes in their enlightenment and progress; because they are not trammelled by restrictive hindrances on the score of creed or custom, like the Hindoos or Mussulmans; and because their commercial pursuits bring them in almost daily contact with European thought and intelligence-which are all facilities in their way for adopting the machinery of modern European education, and which are awanting among the other races. The immediate instruments of instruction are raw school-boys, on the merest pittance of salary; and it is the height of folly to expect that the education imparted by them can at all be solid, systematic, or influential in refining. Berlin wool-work, crochet-knitting, and chanting Gujarati doggerels, are all the

showy acquirements that girls receive, without ever being led into refined ideas, and love of enlightenment and reflection: and what is the result? Girls growing up into women are as void of pure delights as their mothers or grandmothers; and short as the time is that they stay in school, they leave off all reading after entering into life. There is no change wrought over the spirit and bearing of females by the present system of female instruction ; and we have seen several instances in which superstition and ignorance are as prevalent among the so-called educated girls as among women of the old school-with perhaps the only difference, that the former are more showy, more ambitious, more surly than the latter. Two of these girls-the best of their class, honoured with two prizes of books and sewing-boxes, and a medal-cannot now read plain prose with any degree of ease and grace, and have twice been seen going in the company of women paying their superstitious vows to the goddess of the sea! Tell the girls to work for you a pair of slippers, and you shall have a very gaudy-looking cover for the feet; tell them to chant to you a piece of that doggerel, in which the best sentiment and

the best imagery rise not in the least above the ideas of a common lascar or cooly, (and this is the style of Gujarati verses put into their hands,) and you will have a harmonious flow of the treble to please your ear without gratifying your taste: but ask them whether their brother or cousin, proceeding to England, goes by the west or the east, or whether there is any distinction between one piece of plain composition and another, and you behold them standing dumb before you, petrified as before the head of Medusa !*

* This picture is as true of the girls of any caste or creed as of the Parsees. The writer of these pages has twice visited Hin doo girls' schools, and found the melancholy truth verifiedthere is really no female education in India. He has had communication with an intelligent Native of Calcutta on this topic -a Baboo by birth,-and has read articles in candid journals, which have both confirmed him in his view. Discussion on the present state and amelioration of female education was very warm and long-continued, recently, in the papers here, both vernacular and English, in both of which the writer took an active part; and at length found that with the only honorable (?) exception of two Gujarati journals, all shared in the views just as they are here expressed. The organ of the Female Education Committee, when hard pushed, admitted that the Committee imparted only an "infant education" to our girls; and made a defence of the existing rotten system on that ground in a first leader, tinctured by mawkish sentimentality, made doubly disgusting by its hypocritical complexion. It was then replied, by the writer of these pages, that that was 66 a novel discovery or conviction after a trial of twelve long years, during

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This is no exaggeration, but a plain statement of observed facts—as melancholy for the writer to relate as derogatory to the national character of his country. It is alleged, by way of a palliative for all these defects, that the girls, owing to early marriage, and prejudice on account of the schools being conducted, superintended, and planned by men, leave them so early as between the ages of ten and twelve. The early marriage is slowly disappearing, and must be left to time and the action of the very education which is destined to break the neck of this touch-me-not effete custom, and the progress of which it now tends so much to arrest; but the prejudice is the indication of the very defect in the system, and there is more credit for the community in yielding to it, at any expense, than in destroying it. Any one, with

which time the Committee flattered themselves they imparted female education, and for the sake of honesty and truth they would now head their reports with "Female Infant Education." It was after all a great satisfaction to know, that after a dispute continued from time to time, in which they had employed many makeshifts and lame arguments to support themselves, the Committee (or rather their organ) awoke to the full sense of their false pretensions, and frankly admitted that the education here imparted was simply an infant education-by which we understand reading with halts, writing without grammar, chanting without prosody, and calculating without arithmetic!