e:--

My next point has reference to the neglect there seems to
be of religious education, a point to which I drew your
Excellency's attention at the State banquet at Jaipur on the
29th October, 1909. I must say I have great faith in a system
of education, in which secular and religious instruction are
harmoniously combined, as the formation of character
entirely depends upon a basework of religion, and the noble
ideals which our sacred books put before the younger generation
will, I fervently hope, make them loyal and dutiful
citizens of the Empire. Such ideals must inevitably have
their effect on impressionable young men, and it is perhaps
due to such ideals that sedition and anarchy have obtained
so small a footing in the Native States as a whole. In the
Chiefs' College Conference, held at the Mayo College in 1904,
I impressed upon my colleagues the necessity of religious
education for the sons of the chiefs and nobles of Rajputana,
and it should be one of the principal objects in all schools for
the Pandits and the Moulvies to instil in the minds of their
pupils correct notions as to the duty they owe to the community
they belong to and to their Sovereign.

In this respect the ruling chiefs unquestionably reflect the views which
prevail amongst the better-class Indians in British India as well as in
the Native States. The Government of India cannot afford to disregard
them. The Resolution of 1904, it is true, laid it down again definitely
that "in Government institutions, the instruction is and must continue
to be exclusively secular." But much has happened since 1904 to reveal
the evils which our educational system has engendered and to lend
weight to the representations made by responsible exponents of sober
Indian opinion in favour of one of the remedies which it is clearly
within our power to apply. Nor need we really depart from our
time-honoured principle of neutrality in religious matters. All we have
to do is to set apart, in the curriculum of our schools and colleges,
certain hours during which they will be open, on specified conditions,
for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their
children to be brought up. There is no call for compulsion. This is just
one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to
local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central
Government with the sentiment a