administration, which, however admirable in theory, have never been recognized as wants by the people themselves. What they require of Government is the strong maintenance of order, and the persistent extension of material improvements. These are boons which they can understand and appreciate far more highly than the invidiousness of the franchise and the anarchy of self-Government. Under sympathetic guidance, they are capable of great and rapid advance, but without direction of some sort, they are absolutely powerless. They can admire action in others, but without a strong stimulus are loth to engage in it themselves; their philosophic literature shows that they can rival the profoundest German professor in tracking the abysses of transcendental speculation; and with a little practice there can be no doubt that they would soon become as expert as a Frenchman in the elaboration of paper constitutions, and the technical conduct of a debating society; but in the palmiest days of their independence they never had a metalled road in the largest of their cities, nor a swinging punkha in the most luxurious of their palaces. And these are the typical blessings, which it is the province of the British Government to supply.
In the matter of school education, official efforts have not been attended with very brilliant success. The real civilizing influences, that within the last few years have so largely modified the thoughts and habits of the people, have been the Post and the Railway. Their beneficial stimulus has been felt universally; while the effect of our schools has been limited to a single class, and that numerically the smallest and politically the least important. Every head of a department is beset by a crowd of applicants for clerical employ, who have been taught at the public expense to read and write in the Persian character, and who consider that they have thus established a claim to maintenance for life in some Government office. Certainly, their acquirements would not often stand them in much stead in any other vocation. They have never learnt to think, and have totally lost both the faculty of observation and the instinctive propriety of taste which in the uneducated Oriental so often compensate for the want of scholastic training.
Unfortunately, the curriculum of our schools is not calculated to satisfy the modest requirements of the yeoman, the artizan, the trader, and generally the independent middle classes, which ought to supply the material for those local boards which the Government is now so anxious to organize.
