to most of the superior posts, for Englishmen,
and the other recruited in India mainly from Indians, but labelled
Provincial and clearly intended to be inferior. Such a system bore the
stamp, barely disguised, of racial discrimination, at variance with the
spirit, if not the letter, of the Queen's Proclamation--and this at a
time when Indian universities and colleges were bearing abundant fruit,
and some of it at least of a good quality.

The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and
less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education instituted
by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them. Diffusion
had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by
side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government
control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been
also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often
ill-equipped for their task. The training of Indian teachers could
hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and
with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the
loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian
scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence
it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process
of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary
education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed.
Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of
Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature,
scarcely any effort was made--perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a
leaning towards the humanities--to correct by the encouragement of
scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely
literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the
gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in
particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of
exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to
interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it
was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the
domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion
having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality
apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of
educa