“The expenditure of the local cess has been strictly limited to meeting (in the first place) the wants of the people for Vernacular, or as we call it, Primary Education. And the operation of this rule is most salutary. The money collected has been expended on the sort of schools required by the class of people (the cultivators) by whom it was subscribed. And the result has been to infuse into this class, for the first time, some interest in Education. I have been struck, when travelling in the country districts, by the large proportion of the sons of cultivators to be found in every Village School. The people, as a rule, look upon the local Educational cess as a voluntary contribution; they feel a certain amount of pride and pleasure in it, and are apparently eager in looking for advantages to be derived from it.”
The proposed local cess is new in Bengal, but the emergency is pressing, as Sir F. J. Halliday, late Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, in his celebrated Minute on Police and Criminal Justice in Bengal, observes:—
“While the mass of the people remain in their present state of ignorance and debasement, all laws and all systems must be comparatively useless and vain. Above all things that can be done by us for this people is their gradual intellectual and moral advancement through the slow but certain means of a widely spreading popular system of vernacular education.”
Mr. Murdoch, in his pamphlet on National Education in India, assigns the following as special grounds why mass education is necessary:—
“1. To protect them from oppression. The brutish ignorance of the ryots counteracts the best efforts of the higher authorities to shield them from injustice. They are subjected to illegal exactions from Zemindars, petty Government Officers, and the Police. The last have been ‘modelled and re-modelled,’ but with little improvement.
“All are agreed that the primary duty of Government is to afford protection. This seems impossible in India, unless the people are, in some measure, educated.
“2. To prevent absurd alarms endangering the peace of the country. H. Carre Tucker, Esquire, C. B., in his letter to Lord Stanley, gives the following illustrations of the manner in which the people are a prey to the most foolish rumours: ‘A report that Government intended to boil them down for their fat cleared Simlah of hill men! A clever rogue in Goruckpoor is said to have made his fortune by preceding Lord Hastings’ Camp as purveyor of fat little children for the Governor General’s breakfast!’ In 1862 miscreants in Oude levied contributions in villages, pretending that they had been ordered by Government to set them on fire. Had the sepoys received a sound education, the Mutiny would not have occurred.
“3. To promote sanitary reform. India is generally supposed to be the birth-place of that fell disease, cholera, which has more than once carried devastation round the globe. Rich and poor are equally ignorant of the laws of health. Open drains, reeking with filth, often surround the mansions of native millionaires. The annual mortality from preventible causes is frightful.
“4. To ‘develope the resources’ of the country, and improve the social condition of the people. As the brutes are governed by instinct, so the masses of India blindly follow custom. In most cases, it is a sufficient reason for the rejection of any proposal, however much adapted to benefit them, that their ancestors never did such a thing. Education would do much to call forth the enormous latent wealth of India.
“5. To elevate the people intellectually, morally, and religiously. Other considerations affect only this life; the reasons now urged are lasting as eternity.”
