e
on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India. We
alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science
and to make them by education the intellectual partners of the
civilization that subdued them. Of the two tasks, that of government and
that of education, the latter is not by any means the easier. For good
government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs
and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means
the substitution for them of the intellectual and moral conceptions of
what we regard as our higher civilization. Good government represents
to that extent a process of conservation; good education must be
partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process. Yet upon the
more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it
is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon
administrative problems in India. The purpose we have had in view is
presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his
last address to the University of Calcutta as "the raising up of loyal
and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State." But is it a
purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have
kept steadily before them? Is it a purpose that could possibly be
achieved by the _laisser faire_ policy of the State in regard to the
moral and religious side of education? If so, how is it that we have had
of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it?

The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western
countries, which rely upon a highly-developed code of ethics and an
inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of
religious sanctions. In India, as almost everywhere in the East,
religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the
primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured
Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant
force in the life both of every individual and of every separate
community to which the individual belongs. Religion is, in fact, the
basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an
almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of
Western-educated Indians. Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in
the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian
youth independently of all reli