most numerous, but also the most efficiently conducted and
thoroughly managed of all institutions for women in India. The Madras
Christian College for boys and the Sarah Tucker Woman's College of
Tinnevelly are among the best institutions for those classes in India. The
educational system of India culminates in the five Universities of
Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Allahabad and Lahore. These are not instructing,
but simply examining universities like the University of London. With
these the 140 colleges of two grades and of various degrees of efficiency,
are affiliated. In these colleges are found 18,000 students of whom more
than 5,000 graduate yearly. The city of Calcutta is a city of many
colleges and has more college students, relative to its population, than
almost any city of the West.

Though the masses of the people, and especially the women, are still, as
we have seen, grossly ignorant, yet every year encouraging progress is
being made in spreading the blessings of, and in creating a taste for,
education. Every year natives themselves enter more largely into the
educational work and find in it not only a living, but noble scope for
their activities. Among the higher and cultured classes there is a growing
body of young men, besides the ambitious few from the lower classes,
crowding into the higher institutions of the land. It is one of the
problems of the day to direct the mind of this increasing army of
university graduates to other professions than the overcrowded government
service. There is a persistent feeling among these youth that it is the
business of State to supply them with lucrative posts upon their
graduation. And it is the disappointed element of this class which
furnishes so many of the discontented, blatant demagogues who are almost a
menace to the land.

[Illustration: Madura Mission Hospital For Women.]

Yet this educational work is one of the potent, leavening influences of
the country, and is helping greatly in carrying quietly forward one of the
mightiest revolutions that have been witnessed in any land. In its train
follows closely the social elevation of the people. The relaxation of the
terrible caste system, the elevation of woman and her redemption from some
of the cruelties and injustice of the past, immediately attend that
expanding knowledge which results from the schools of the land.

Protestant missions are preeminent in their work of educating the
Christian communitie