Order of 1844,
which threw a large number of posts in the public service open to
English-speaking Indians without distinction of race or creed, and in
Sir Charles Wood's Educational Despatch of 1854, which resulted in the
creation of a Department for Public Instruction, the foundation of the
three senior Universities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, the
affiliation to them of schools and colleges for purposes of examination,
and the inauguration of the "grant-in-aid" system for the encouragement
of native educational enterprise by guaranteeing financial support
according to a fixed scale to all schools that satisfied certain tests
of efficiency in respect of secular instruction. Duff's influence had
assured the supremacy of English in secular education, but he never
succeeded in inducing Government to go a step beyond neutrality in
regard to religious education, and though the remarkable successes which
he had in the meantime achieved, not only as a teacher but as a
missionary, amongst the highest classes of Calcutta society no doubt led
him to hope that, even without any active co-operation from Government,
the spread of English education would in itself involve the spread of
both Christian ethics and Christian doctrine, he never ceased to preach
the necessity of combining religious and moral with secular education or
to prophesy the evils which would ensue from their divorce.

The system inaugurated by the Educational Minute of 1835 and developed
in the Educational Orders of 1854 began well. The number of young
Indians who took advantage of it was relatively small. They were drawn
mostly from the better classes, and they were brought into direct
contact with their English teachers, many of them very remarkable men
whose influence naturally, and often unconsciously, helped to form the
character of their pupils as well as to develop their intellect--and
most of all, perhaps, in the mission schools; for the Christian missions
were at that time the dominant factor in Indian educational work. In
1854 when there were only 12,000 scholars in all the Government schools,
mission schools mustered four times that number and the rights they
acquired, under the Orders of 1854, to participate in the new
"grants-in-aid" helped them to retain the lead which in some respects,
though not as to numbers, they still maintain. For more than 50 years
after the Minute of 1835, and especially during the two or three decades
that followed the