bettering their material prospects. When they arrive they begin work
without any knowledge of the character and customs of the people. Some
are employed in inspection and others as professors, and the latter
especially are apt to lose heart when they realize the thanklessness of
their task and their social isolation. In some cases indifference is the
worst result, but in others--happily rare--they themselves, I am
assured, catch the surrounding contagion of discontent, and their
influence tends rather to promote than to counteract the estrangement of
the rising generation committed to their charge. Some men, no doubt,
rise superior to all these adverse conditions and, in comparing the men
of the present day with those of the past, one is apt to remember only
the few whose names still live in the educational annals of India and to
forget the many who have passed away without making any mark. The fact,
however, remains that nowadays the Europeans who have the greatest
influence over their Indian pupils are chiefly to be found amongst the
missionaries with whom teaching is not so much a profession as a
vocation.

CHAPTER XIX.

SOME MEASURES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM.

Though already in 1889, when Lord Lansdowne was Viceroy, an important
resolution, drafted by Sir Anthony (now Lord) MacDonnell as Secretary to
Government, was issued, drawing attention to some of the most glaring
defects of our educational system from the point of view of intellectual
training and of discipline, and containing valuable recommendations for
remedying them, it seems to have had very little practical effect. A
more fruitful attempt to deal with the question was made during Lord
Curzon's Viceroyalty. He summoned and presided over an Educational
Conference, of which the results were embodied in a Government
Resolution issued on March 11, 1904, and in the Universities Act of the
same year. They were received at the time with a violent outburst of
indignation by Indian politicians, who claim to represent the educated
intellect of the country. The least that Lord Curzon was charged with
was a deliberate attempt to throttle higher education in India. This
factious outcry has now died away, except amongst the irreconcilables,
and Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, an authority whom even Hindu partisanship
can hardly repudiate, declared in his last Convocation speech that the
new regulations which are now being brought into operation, far from
bearing out