TWENTY-SIXTH CONVOCATION.
(By The Honorable D. F. Carmichael.)
Gentlemen, Graduates of 1883,—I now rise to discharge the duty, which the Right Hon'ble the Chancellor has entrusted to me, of delivering the annual address, in this the last year of my service amongst a people I have known so long and have (if you will believe me) loved so well. With the exception of two distinguished educational officers, who still labor in our midst, and who were created fellows by the Act of Incorporation in 1857, I am, I think, the oldest member of this University now in India. In the year following the Incorporation Act, there was, so far as I recollect, no addition made to the Senate; in 1859, or four and twenty years ago, I was the last of five appointed to it by Sir Charles Trevelyan, whom I had the honor of serving as his Private Secretary.
I am to exhort you, gentlemen, "to conduct yourselves suitably unto the position, to which by the degrees conferred upon you, you have attained." Can I doubt that you will do so?
The knowledge you have acquired during long years of study, Habits of study. has called into daily exercise your perseverance, your watchfulness, and self-control. These habits must have excluded a host of follies and vices. In the morning of life, when the blandishments of passion take the reason prisoner, these habits, I persuade myself, have sustained and invigorated your mind, have imparted a freshness and a healthful tone to its enjoyments and fitted it for the more arduous purposes of your work in the world.
And, my young friends, the knowledge you have gained is to be prized not only for the qualities and serene pleasures which it directly tends to excite, but also for the material blessings which it confers upon society. Look back to the days of the old system of education, under which the students of British India were delivered up to the Moulvi and the Pandit, and you will admit that it is possible for knowledge, when wisdom has not guided her impulses, and false systems have arrested her progress, to damp the ardour of invention, to repress the nobler energies of the understanding, and to result in moral apathy and a stagnant civilisation.
Let me tell you how education in India was emancipated. How Education was emancipated in India. It is now exactly seventy years ago that Parliament directed the East India Company to set apart a lac of rupees a year "for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of
