l market. The grant-in-aid system led to the foundation of
large numbers of schools and colleges under private native management,
in which the native element became gradually supreme or at least vastly
predominant, and it enabled them to adopt so low a scale of fees that
many parents who had never dreamt of literacy for themselves were
encouraged to try and secure for some at least of their children the
benefit of this miraculous Open Sesame to every kind of worldly
advancement. Much of the raw material pressed into secondary schools was
quite unsuitable, and little or no attempt was made to sift it in the
rough. Numbers therefore began to drop out somewhere on the way,
disappointed of their more ambitious hopes and having acquired just
enough new ideas to unfit them for the humbler work to which they might
otherwise have been brought up[17]. On the other hand, whilst schools
and colleges, chiefly under private native management, were multiplied
in order to meet the growing demand, the instruction given in them
tended to get petrified into mechanical standards, which were appraised
solely or mainly by success in the examination lists. In fact, education
in the higher sense of the term gave way to the mere cramming of
undigested knowledge into more or less receptive brains with a view to
an inordinate number of examinations, which marked the various stages of
this artificial process. The personal factor also disappeared more and
more in the relations between scholars and teachers as the teaching
staff failed to keep pace with the enormous increase in numbers.

All these deteriorating influences, though they were perhaps not then so
visible on the surface, were already at work in the 80's, when two
important Government Commissions were held whose labours, with the most
excellent intentions, were destined to have directly and indirectly, the
most baneful effects upon Indian education. The one was the Education
Commission of 1882-83, appointed by Lord Ripon, with Sir William Hunter
as President, and the other the Public Service Commission of 1886-87,
appointed by Lord Dufferin, with Sir Charles Aitchison as President. It
is quite immaterial whether the steps taken by the Government of India
during the subsequent decade were actually due to the recommendations of
the Education Commission, or whether the Report of the Commission merely
afforded a welcome opportunity to carry into practice the views that
were then generally in