d been empowered to levy taxes
on the citizens, they had not so much as thought about building a
school, and had neglected various other civic responsibilities. The
Company--rightly or wrongly--sought to justify their inaction with the
excuse which the Corporation of Madras has--rightly or wrongly--made
for civic inaction so many times since, namely that 'no funds' had
been assigned to them by Government for the works that they were
called upon to undertake. As for taxation, they remarked that the
people in Black Town had not been schooled to civic taxation; and it
is true that any ruthless collection of taxes might have meant
wholesale departures from the city, or at any rate a serious check to
further immigration. So the municipal school for Native children never
came into being.

Meanwhile the Company's free school in White Town, started by Mr.
Orde, continued its work under Mr. Orde's successors; and elementary
instruction was imparted therein to a heterogeneous crowd of
children--English, Eurasians, and Indians--Christians and Hindus.
Eventually the school was put in charge of the chaplain of St. Mary's
Church in the Fort, and the chaplain and his churchwardens agreed in
thinking that such education was not of the kind that a Church should
control, and that it was rather their duty to institute in Madras a
residential free-school for poor Protestant children of British
descent, which should be conducted on the lines of the many 'charity
schools' in England; and in 1715, with the approval of the Directors,
'St. Mary's Church Charity School' was founded. The event is of
particular interest; for St. Mary's Church Charity School developed
later into the 'Male Asylum'--the institution which has done so much
for boys and girls for so many years, and which, after changing its
habitation on various occasions, is now comfortably housed in spacious
premises in the Poonamallee road.

The year 1715 is noteworthy on another account. St. Mary's School
having been founded solely for the benefit of children of European
descent, the native children who had attended the Company's day-school
were deprived of education. The Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge undertook to supply the want, by establishing schools in
Madras for the special benefit of Indian children; and the year 1715,
therefore, is the date which marks the first beginning of the
educational work that English Protestant missionary societies have
done in