heir careers. The result
is that many fail, and these unfortunates, half-educated and spoiled for
any sort of useful occupation, vegetate miserably, come to hate that
Westernism which they do not understand, and give themselves up to
anarchistic revolutionary agitation. Sir Alfred Lyall well describes the
dark side of Western education in the East when he says of India:
"Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural
that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed
education to be a certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen
like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest
remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case, it
was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt
the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of
British rule. We have since discovered by experience, that, although
education is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable
to healthy progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration
of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the
frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak
brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of
which the disappointment is bitterly resented."[249]

Indeed, some Western observers of the Orient, particularly colonial
officials, have been so much impressed by the political and social
dangers arising from the existence of this "literate proletariat" of
semi-educated failures that they are tempted to condemn the whole
venture of Western education in the East as a mistake. Lord Cromer, for
example, was decidedly sceptical of the worth of the Western-educated
Egyptian,[250] while a prominent Anglo-Indian official names as the
chief cause of Indian unrest, "the system of education, which we
ourselves introduced--advisedly so far as the limited vision went of
those responsible; blindly in view of the inevitable consequences."[251]

Yet these pessimistic judgments do not seem to make due allowance for
the inescapable evils attendant on any transition stage. Other observers
of the Orient have made due allowance for this factor. Vambery, for
instance, notes the high percentage of honest and capable native
officials in the British Indian and French North African civil service
(the bulk of these officials, of course, Western-educated men), and
concludes: "Strictly