ic Instruction and of
the Teachers' Association, the Governor, Sir George Clarke, alluded to
some of the effects of Western education on the younger generation of
Indians:--"It is widely admitted by the thoughtful Indians that there
are signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of
reverence for authority, of a decadence of manners and of growing moral
laxity. The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their
power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India.
There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain.
The educated European may throw off the sanctions of religion; but he
has to live in a social environment which has been built up on the basis
of Christian morality, and he cannot divest himself of the influences
which have formed his conscience. The educated or partially educated
Indian who has learned to look on life and the affairs of men from a
Western standpoint has no such environment and may find himself morally
rudderless on an ocean of doubt. The restraints of ancient philosophies,
which have unconsciously helped to shape the lives of millions in India
who had only the dimmest knowledge of them, have disappeared from his
mental horizon. There is nothing to take their place. Ancient customs,
some of them salutary and ennobling, have come to be regarded as
obsolete. No other customs of the better sort have come to take their
place, and blindly to copy the superficial customs of the West is to
ignore all that is best in western civilization."

Commenting on his Excellency's speech, the Bombay _Examiner_, a weekly
paper very ably conducted in the interests of the Roman Catholic
missions, drew attention, in the following terms to some of the causes
of the mischief.

(1) The study of English history in schools reveals a gradual transition
from an unlimited monarchy to a limited monarchy differing barely from a
republic, the gradual transfer of political power from kings and
aristocracy through the barons and then through the burghers and finally
to the whole people. In reality this process took almost a thousand
years, but in the schoolroom it is compressed into a term. The
gradualness of the process, the long preparation of each class of
citizens, the slow political education of the masses, all of which forms
a long historical perspective, is through the medium of the text-book
thrown upon, the screen at once as a flat picture. It may not occu