A very large percentage when they
actually sit for their examinations are nothing short of
physical wrecks.

Dr. Williams proceeds to quote Dr. Mullick, an eminent Hindu physician
who has devoted himself to helping young students:--

The places where the students live huddled up together
are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are
dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of
infectious sickness ... they lie in the same place as
others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting
alarmingly common among students owing to the sputum of
infected persons being allowed to float about with the dust
in crowded messes.... Most of them live in private
messes where a hired cook and single servant have complete
charge of his food and house-keeping, and things are stolen,
foodstuffs are adulterated, badly cooked and badly served.

Dr. Williams, who states emphatically that "it is not exaggeration to
say that the student is often half-starved," goes on to deal with the
moral drawbacks of a life which is under no effective supervision and is
not even under the restraints, implied in the term "good form," that
play so important a part in Universities where there is a real
collegiate life.

When you segregate your young men by thousands in the
heart of this "city of dreadful night," amid conditions of
life which are most antagonistic to moral and physical well-being...
the result is a foregone conclusion, and it
does not only mean physical degeneration, it also means moral
degeneration, and it becomes a most potent predisposing
factor in political disease. Of that there can be no shadow
of doubt.

The material conditions are not, it is true, nearly so bad in many other
parts of India as they are in Bengal, and especially in Calcutta (though
the Bengalees claim the intellectual primacy of India), and it is on the
moral and physical evils produced by those conditions that Dr. Garfield
Williams chiefly dwells. But the intellectual evils for all but a small
minority are in their way quite as grave, and they are inherent to the
system. Take the case of a boy brought up until he is old enough to go
to school in some small town of the _mofussil_, anywhere in India, by
parents who have never been drawn into any contact, however remote, with
Western ideas or Western knowledge. From these purely Indian
surroundings his parents, who are wil