Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras/Part 2/Honorable H. S. Cunningham, M.A.
SEVENTEENTH CONVOCATION.
(By The Hon'ble H. S. Cunningham, M.A.)
My Lord, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, and Gentlemen,—The ordainers of today's ceremonial have decreed that a part of the programme should consist in an address by a member of the Senate to those who have taken degrees, exhorting them to conduct worthy of the honour conferred upon them. The objects of the University. They thought, I suppose, that some one acting as the Senate's mouth-piece should express to you what is, I am sure, the Senate's common feeling—our deep sense of the importance of the objects for which the University exists, our earnest hope that those objects may be attained, and our hearty good wishes, gentlemen, for yourselves. And in wishing you well, we wish well to the country at large, for with you and such as you lie the hopes of the India of the future. It is here, in the educated classes, in the thinking, knowing, reading portion of the community, that is to be found the real outcome of our administration and the true test of its success. It will be in vain that year by year the machinery of Government is rendered more elaborate and complete—in vain that the last discovery of science, the last triumph of art, each new invention, each fresh device for enriching and embellishing life, is transported to your shores and India brought into the full blaze of European culture,—all will be in vain if there is not meanwhile growing up a class of sensible, intelligent, sound-thinking, and right-feeling men, with vigorous judgments and high aims and pure tastes, who will know how to use these many advantages to good effect, how to cause that the contact of East and West shall be a blessing instead of a disaster—who will act, as it were, as the interpreters and heralds of knowledge to their less instructed countrymen, and be the medium through which knowledge, and the many blessings which knowledge connotes may filter down to the strata of society which lie below them. We must take care, then, that our culture is practically useful with respect to the circumstances of those who get it. Practical usefulness. Otherwise learning degenerates into pedantry. Let us remember the apologue of the French savant who was caught, so historians assure us, by an Arab tribe. His captors proceeded at once to turn their prize to good purpose. They asked him if he could ride? He answered, "No"; could he fight? again a negative; could he run? No. He said, he was accustomed only to sedentary pursuits. Thereupon they tarred and feathered him and set him to hatch eggs, that being the only strictly sedentary pursuit with which they happened to be acquainted, and of the practical utility they were at all convinced.
And not only must our culture be practically useful, but those who receive it must beware of the dangers and responsibilities which it entails. In the first place there is the danger incidental to all great unsettlements of thought and sudden inroads of new ideas, and the shock which is thus given to society. History of India and its exceptional nature. In this respect the History of India has been exceptional. In most nations the progress of a nation in culture has been gradual; knowledge has been learnt line upon line and letter by letter; the whole community has gone more or less along with the leaders of its thought; society has become accustomed to altered forms of life ; new ideas have permeated and leavened the whole structure before being adopted by any one fraction of it. In India, it has been far otherwise. We look back to a remote period in the very dawn of history, and we find her in the van of civilization. We find a branch of that happy and noble Aryan community from which you and we, gentlemen, take our rise, practising many of the amenities and all the virtues of civilized life at a time when most of what is now regarded as the civilized world was sunk in barbarism. India, however, appears at an early date to have entered upon a cycle of national existence in which progress found no place, and to have remained stationary while the nations of the West sprang into being and took up the running. The structure of society admitted of little change, and the prevailing theologies discouraged the desire for it. India was one of the stationary powers of the world. Then at last the spell was broken, her long sleep was ended. She was caught by a wave of the turbulent European life, at one of its most turbulent moments, and hurried along on that resistless current to that future which awaits us all. Henceforth India had to be a member of the modern world. Henceforward all was change, new ideas poured in apace. Enlarged knowledge made havoc of the old traditionary beliefs, and great revolutions of thought came about. The most august and venerable institutions began to shake and crumble. All the old paths of life were broken up. Now this is a process, in the highest degree perilous to all concerned. Change of course there must be; we can none, even the most conservative among us, be exactly as were our forefathers:—
- What custom wills, in all things should we do it,
- The dust on antique Time would lie unswept,
- And mountainous Error be too highly heaped
- For Truth to overpeer—
But still there is a great danger as well as great pain in leaving the old customary paths in which so many preceding generations walked. The old belief, with all its venerated associations, learnt from our childhood, seems to form part of a man's very heart, and, true or false, to lose it, is to lose a portion of himself. Life looks cold and dreary and hopeless without the graces that the piety and fancy of younger generations have thrown around it. "If"—we feel inclined to cry with the poet—
- "If the sad grave of human ignorance bear
- One flower of hope, ah, pass and leave it there—"
Leave at any rate the hopes and beliefs, which, all illusive as they may have been, served yet to irradiate a darkling life and to guide some wandering spirit across the trackless ocean of existence! It is for those who encounter these dangers not to ignore them, but to face them at once with modesty and courage. Let them beware of lawlessness, cynicism or arrogance of thought;
- Make knowledge circle with the wind,
- But let her herald, Eeverence, fly
- Before her to whatever sky
- Bear seed of men or growth of mind;
Be slow to use your liberty as a cloak of licentiousness. Be slow to abandon those traditionary rules of a temperate life, which come to you, with all the sanction of religion and experience of ages. Come to the new world of thought that has opened upon you, but come with cautious steps and a reverent mind. Do not forget that if, from the circumstances of the case we are debarred from offering you instruction in many of the deeper, graver, and more serious aspects of life, none the less do those aspects exist, and none the more safely can they be ignored by you. What is common between the East and the West. Underneath these different religions, yours and ours, and nearer the surface perhaps than theologians would have us believe, lie certain common aspirations, common cravings, common pangs, and the man who ignores them, ignores the highest part about himself and is on the high road to a degrading materialism. It is a line conception of the poet which represents man as coming at his birth fresh from celestial abode with all the signs of it about him, which gradually, in rude contact with the world, fade away—
With something of a mother's mind
And no unworthy aim
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster child, her inmate, Man,
Forget the splendors of his home
And that imperial palace whence he came.
But they must not be forgotten. Art in its fairest forms, science with its train of wonders, literature with its thousand delights, will to the man without moral sense but make the absence of that moral sense the more apparent. And remember that while there is endless diversity as to dogma, that diversity does not extend to the world of morals, and while theologians are hopelessly at variance about their respective creeds, there is no such variance among good and reasonable men as to how we ought to live and what objects we ought to propose to ourselves. Virtue and vice have the same meanings to us all. Honesty and justice and truth—that much neglected virtue, candour of intellect—purity of soul and body—magnanimity on the one hand, and mercy and generosity and self-devotion on the other—these are the same to all alike, these are the real landmarks by which our course must be steered; and while these remain intact, the shock of dogmatic systems, though it may perplex, need never overwhelm. It is not when men doubt the dogmatic and philosophical parts of their creed s,but when moral truths are obscured that individuals become corrupt and nations sink into infamy. Education may, and probably will, make a man question his creed—it never need make him doubt about his conduct. Let a student remember this, and that everything he learns should tend towards ennobling himself and bettering the world about him, and there need be no fear for the result. Let him remember Lord Bacon's warning:—"I would," says he, "address one general admonition to all; that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge and that they seek it not either for the pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit or power or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect it and govern it in charity."
But it may be said, why educate at all? Ignorance "the curse of God " It is, perhaps, hardly respectful to so lettered an audience as that which I address even to consider such a question. But if an answer were necessary, the first would be that ignorance is a highly expensive luxury, and that India, having only fifty millions a year and a great deal to do with them, cannot afford to be ignorant. It is "the curse of God;" it costs lives, it costs money, it costs happiness. Men, when first the curtain rises upon the stage of history, are wretched, trembling beings, a rather inferior sort of wild beasts, snatching a precarious livelihood from shell-fish or berries, exposed to untold hardships, brutalized by the most degrading customs, frequently exterminated in the unequal conflict with disease, misery and wild animals more powerful and courageous than themselves. By slow and painful degrees the race mounts up and culminates at last in the fully civilized man. Each step in the ascent is a piece of knowledge, a further acquaintance with the working of the world's machinery and the rules according to which the world around us proceeds, and so a better mastery over natural results.
Whenever we violate the laws of nature, whether intentionally or not, we suffer at once. A knowledge of laws of nature. For half the ills of life there is a remedy or a protection could we only find it. Take the simplest of all matter, the water we drink. Calcutta was at one time the perennial home of cholera, one of the fountain heads from which that fell disease constantly started to devastate mankind. The water available for drinking was, every scientific man declared, sufficient to dispose everyone to disease, and to spread, if not to originate it. A supply of absolutely pure water was brought in. After a great deal of discussion the Brahmins decided that it was not irreligious to drink it. What was the result ? The very first year the deaths from cholera sank to less than half the number of the previous year and to very little more than to half what had ever been known in the very healthiest year on record. And a corresponding diminution occurred in other cognate diseases. Much the same was experienced in Bombay, and I have no doubt, though happily we have no cholera here, that a similar improvement in the public health will be experienced here. But these are only three among all the thousands of cities and towns in India, and in many of them, Delhi is one I remember, the death-rate is awfully high, and the cause has been distinctly traced by men of science to impure water. Generally you may be sure that wherever you have a town population, drinking out of wells, a considerable percentage of them is poisoned every year, and a still larger percentage condemned to the misery of enfeebled health. This is a needless waste of life to be debited to ignorance. Then I will take another matter, smallpox; it is not such a scourge here as in some parts of India, but it cost the Presidency 39,000 lives last year. In the Punjab and N. W. Provinces it is almost universal. In 1866, no less than 66,000 persons died of it in the Punjab. Altogether in 1871 over 100,000 people died in India of small-pox—no, not of small-pox, they died of ignorance. Small-pox was the blade that struck them, but ignorance was the destroying angel who wielded it, and they might be well and alive now but for the ignorance which shut their eyes to the safeguard which science offers. The best proof of this was that when strenuous vaccinating operations were set on foot, in the Punjab, for several years past the annual average has sunk to 29,000.
Then as to cost of money, look at what ignorance costs the ryot. Cost of ignorance. Take Mr. Robertson's most interesting report on Indian Agriculture, and see how science, which is only a grand word for common sense and accurate information, would enrich him if he would let her; how he might have bigger crops and more of them, and better and more productive cattle, and how ignorance makes him attempt what he never ought, and leave unattempted the thing he might do with profit, and do the right thing in the wrong and costly way, and in fact, commit all the blunders that ignorance and empiricism must, till science comes to lend her aid.
Then as to happiness, what pleasure lost, what beauties unperceived, what a stupid, brute-like, uninteresting affair does life become to the man who walks through it with his eyes shut to its wonders and beauties. Pleasures of knowledge. To the real student, of course, to ask him why he likes education, is to ask him why he likes light rather than darkness and life than death. With his books he lives a higher and nobler life than the present gives him. His untrammelled soul communes with the wisest and best men of his own day, and with them both in their happiest moments : he feels the pleasant excitement of intellectual effort : he experiences the charm of difficulty grappled with and overcome; he climbs, exhilirated with past success, from one vantage ground of truth to another, sees an ever-increasing area at his feet, and welcomes new light into his soul. Fired with the noble acts of other men, he resolves that he will do something to benefit and ennoble mankind; he thrills with the promptings of an honourable ambition, that last infirmity of noble minds. These are the pleasures for which he is content to live and labor, for these he rejects the ignominious joys of sense; for them he scorns delights and lives laborious days, or rather in them he finds his greatest delight and his best repose. Gentlemen, these are the pleasures which knowledge has to give, and for the encouragement of which the Indian Universities were designed. Education of Zemindars. They have already done good work. And it is a fact of happy augury for India that the people so generally recognize them, and that the leaders o£ Indian society are so aware of the importance of education that one of the first gentlemen in the country (the Rajah of Vencatagherry) is now urging on Government a scheme for the public education of all the sons of the Zemindars of the Presidency, and has backed his proposal by an offer of a munificent donation. Already the Universities have done much, but they are still infant institutions. I wish I could give you an idea of an English University. Description of an English University. Imagine a venerable city, standing amid sweet English meadows, embowered in immemorial trees, washed by the waters of a classic stream— picture to yourselves her streets flanked not by the emporia of trade but by solemn shrines and time-encrusted colleges, redolent with the piety and learning of 1,000 years; here are cool cloisters and long arcades and the trim gardens where learned leisure walks and thinks : youngest but not least fair among the sister edifices is the Temple where the votaries of physical science may study and adore : towering amid the rest, and presiding over them is a noble Library rich with gathered treasures of the literary world; there is a sweet stillness in the air, for it is learning's chosen home; the genius of the place breathes calm around; here you will find a thousand students, the flower of England's youth, all busy with the exploration of some field or other of learning's wide domain—you will find mind opening to mind in the healthy commerce of opinion, competition without a touch of envy, and controversies unlike those of later life, without a drop of .gall. "How sweet to linger here," one cries
- "With fair philosophies,"
- That lift the mind!
How natural the great poet's vow,
"Let my dne feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister's pale,
And love the high embow'd roof
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light;
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full -voiced choir below,
In service high and anthems clear
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstacies
And bring all Heaven before mine eyes."
Gentlemen, I walked in those streets a few months ago, and witnessed a curious and illustrious assembly. Products of an English University. There was the Head of the English Church, the Primate of England; the Head of the Anglo-Roman Church, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster; the Head of the English Law, the Lord Chancellor of England; Lord Coleridge, Master of the hearts of all whom eloquence affects; Lord Salisbury, the brilliant bearer of a great historic name; Stanhope, the philosophic historian; Lyddon, the ascetic dogmatist; Arnold, the Epicurean man of letters; a great collection of orators, statesmen, philosophers; men of art and science—what collected them there? What united men otherwise so diverse in taste and opinion? What but a common piety to their Alma Mater, a common allegiance to the place where they first learnt to think, first experienced the rapture of truth, first listened to the strains of philosophy, "not stern and rugged as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute," first learnt how many, and how ennobling are the pleasures with which learning rewards her sons.
Gentlemen, there was a curious characteristic of this meeting it was spontaneous and unofficial, Independence of thought. a mere meeting of a club of Oxford men, a Debating Society and a Reading-Room, to celebrate the first half century of its existence. You may take a hint from this. The most important education is what a man gives himself. We want to see in you independent thought; what is wanted for India is a class of independent and high principled, courageous men who will form an enlightened public opinion. Many things are done badly or left undone, because Government is afraid to move without more guidance from public opinion than it at present receives; you have the remedy for this in your own hands. We want you to think and learn and feel on public matters, and so to strengthen the Government in its task of ruling this great empire for its good. You and we, brothers in blood, have met after long centuries of separation, not so very far from the cradle where our common rise began—we have met, and we must resolve as brothers ought, that our meeting shall be for the benefit of both, resolve this, and be men enough, courageous enough, high-minded enough to carry your resolution into effect, and there is practically no limit to the good you may effect, and the blessings which you may be instrumental in pouring on mankind.
"Methinks," said Milton of his own country, A nobler cycle of existence. then in a critical moment of her existence, "methinks I see in mind a mighty and puissant nation, rousing herself, like a strongman after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her, as an eagle, renewing her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole tribe of timorous and flocking birds, with those also who love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms." Gentlemen, let us apply Milton's language of courage and hope to your own case, and think of India as the mighty and puissant nation, rousing herself, after her long, long sleep, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight, and preparing herself, as I pray God she may, to enter upon a nobler and happier cycle of existence than ever yet has dawned upon her.
Then whenever it is fated that we are again to part company and History writes, The monument of British rule in India. "Fuit" upon the British Raj, she will not record that the races of rulers and administrators from the far West came hither on a bootless errand, or departed without having achieved a grand result. She will point to a long list of solid improvements effected, to many real curses of the race removed, to happiness brought within the reach of classes who knew not of its very existence, to life rendered to many millions something brighter, better, and nobler than before; she will record how the English found India impoverished, and left her opulent; found her the home of ignorance and superstition, placed the sacred torch of knowledge in her hand; found her the prey of the great untamed forces of nature, turned those very forces to enrich and embellish her; found her the monopoly of a despotic few, left her the common heritage of all her sons; found her a house divided against itself, and the prey of the first comer, left her harmonious and tranquil, and therefore strong; found her a mere congeries of petty tyrannies with no principle but mutual distrust and no policy but mutual extermination, left her a grand consolidated empire with justice for its base and the common happiness its guiding star.