that crime prevails, and that in the adoption of measures of policy, however salutary or ameliorating their tendency, government cannot reckon with confidence on the moral support of an intelligent and instructed community? Is it possible that a benevolent, a wise, a just government can allow this state of things any longer to continue?”
Notwithstanding this state of things and Mr. Adam’s three laborious reports exposing it; the Calcutta Council of Education decided:—
“They were of opinion that the execution of the plan would be ‘almost impracticable,’ and that it would also involve more expense than Mr. Adam supposed. ‘A further experience,’ they add, ‘and a more mature consideration of the important subject of Education in this country, has led us to adhere to the opinion formerly expressed by us, that our efforts should be at first concentrated to the chief towns or sudder stations of districts, and to the improvement of education among the higher and middling classes of the population; in the expectation that through the agency of these scholars, an educational reform will descend to the rural Vernacular Schools, and its benefits be rapidly transfused among all those excluded in the first instance by abject want from a participation in its advantages.”
Time has shewn the fallacy of this conclusion. Mr. Woodrow, Inspector of Schools, who has thoroughly and practically studied the question, estimated in 1861, 22 years after the rejection of Mr. Adam’s plans, that, including every variety of Schools, Government, Missionary and Indigenous, in the richest and most populous portion of Bengal, there are about three persons in every hundred under education; while the proportion under instruction in England is one in 7 34, in all India it is one in 400. Dr. Mouat, the Inspector of Jails, and for many years Secretary to the Council of Education, in his last Report of the Jails in Bengal in 1867, states:—
“Of the 95,951 prisoners in prison in 1866—324 or 0.34 per cent. were fairly educated for their position in life, 5,367 males and seventeen females, or 5.61 per cent. could read and write, and 85,075 males and 5,168 or 94.05 per cent, were entirely ignorant. In the preceding five years from 1861 to 1865—2,974 men and two women, or 0.98 per cent, were fairly educated; 20,798 males and thirty-one females, or 6.87 per cent. could read and write; and 269,014 men and 10,496 women, or 92.15 per cent. were absolutely ignorant.”
“The collection of these statistics shows that, marvellous as the progress of the University of Calcutta is, the education of the mass of the people who form the bulk of the criminal population makes no advance, if the offenders against the law are a fair sample of the state of the general population in this important particular.”
Mr. Adam resigned his office in disgust at his plans being rejected. Lord Hardinge in 1844 established 101 Vernacular Schools, but they failed necessarily, as they were placed under no
