is this new school which has now got hold of the
younger educated classes.

Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed
whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them
under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to
account with no mean measure of success. I must reserve the thorny
question of education for separate treatment. All I need say for the
present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it
been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from
the realities of Indian life, the results might have been very
different. As it is, in the form given to it in our Indian schools and
colleges, which have been allowed to drift more and more into native
hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the
output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees
in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what
is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this
mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been
disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of
knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for
them. Soured on the one hand by their own failure, or by the failure of
such examinations as they may have succeeded in passing to secure for
them the employment to which they aspired, and scorning the sort of work
to which they would otherwise have been trained, they are ripe for every
revolt. That is the material upon which the leaders of unrest have most
successfully worked, and it is only recently that some of the more
sober-minded Bengalees of the older generation have begun to realize the
dangers inherent in such a system. When in 1903 Lord Curzon brought in
his Universities Bill to mitigate some of the most glaring evils of the
system, there was a loud and unanimous outcry in Bengal that Government
intended to throttle higher education because it was education that was
making a "nation" of Bengal. Subsequent events have shown that that
measure was not only urgently needed, but that it came too late to cure
the mischief already done, and was, if anything, too circumscribed in
its scope. The storm it raised was intensified shortly afterwards by
Lord Curzon's famous Convocation speech, into which the sensitive and
emotional Bengalee hastened to read a humiliating indictment of the
"na