4th, 1883.

* * * * *

INDIA.

LECTURE I.

WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

When I received from the Board of Historical Studies at Cambridge the
invitation to deliver a course of lectures, specially intended for the
candidates for the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some time,
feeling extremely doubtful whether in a few public discourses I could
say anything that would be of real use to them in passing their
examinations. To enable young men to pass their examinations seems now
to have become the chief, if not the only object of the universities;
and to no class of students is it of greater importance to pass their
examinations, and to pass them well, than to the candidates for the
Indian Civil Service.

But although I was afraid that attendance on a few public lectures,
such as I could give, would hardly benefit a candidate who was not
already fully prepared to pass through the fiery ordeal of the three
London examinations, I could not on the other hand shut my eyes
completely to the fact that, after all, universities were not meant
entirely, or even chiefly, as stepping-stones to an examination, but
that there is something else which universities can teach and ought to
teach--nay, which I feel quite sure they were originally meant to
teach--something that may not have a marketable value before a Board
of Examiners, but which has a permanent value for the whole of our
life, and that is a real interest in our work, and, more than that, a
love of our work, and, more than that, a true joy and happiness in our
work. If a university can teach that, if it can engraft that one small
living germ in the minds of the young men who come here to study and
to prepare themselves for the battle of life, and, for what is still
more difficult to encounter, the daily dull drudgery of life, then, I
feel convinced, a university has done more, and conferred a more
lasting benefit on its pupils than by helping them to pass the most
difficult examinations, and to take the highest place among Senior
Wranglers or First-Class men.

Unfortunately, that kind of work which is now required for passing one
examination after another, that process of cramming and crowding which
has of late been brought to the highest pitch of perfection, has often
the very opposite effect, and instead of exciting an appetite for
work, it is apt to produce an indifference, if not a kind of
intellectual nausea, that may l