are doing, the discoveries they are making, the inventions they are introducing. But, while all of you will make a thorough acquaintance with your own profession or work, whatever it may be, your first duty, you will have many hours of leisure in which to use your knowledge for the benefit of the community amongst which you may be placed. You have received a liberal education. You know its value. You will know it still more. Do what in you lies to give to the masses of your countrymen that which you yourselves have so freely received, and, wherever you may be placed, be each of you a centre of light, illuminating and revivifying all around you. Government has done much, and no doubt will continue to do much, to promote education; but it is on you, on those who have received it in its highest forms, that will largely rest the responsibility of raising the intellectual as well as the moral condition of your country. Educate the masses. Educate the masses. Stimulate the desire for education where-ever it exists, where there is no such desire strive to create it. Without education you never will have national life, never become a great people influencing for good the history of the world.
You have received a liberal education yourselves. Give it to your women. Educate your women. Much has been done in this respect during the past twenty years, and all honor to those who have led the way. But much remains to be done. It is but the veriest fraction of the females of this country, that are under instruction. Further by your example this good work. Use your utmost influence to extend it. And as for generations', perhaps, the national sentiment is likely to insist on girls leaving school at an early age, a great opportunity is provided for you to supply them after leaving school with a healthy literature in their own language. I am glad to see one of the members of the Senate devoting the leisure of a ripe age to this most commendable work. Do you take it up. The education and training you have received pre-eminently fit you for it. Apply yourselves to it. Provide a vernacular literature of interesting and useful knowledge—a literature of romance too, if you will, breathing a lofty moral spirit—a literature that will brighten what might otherwise be many a weary listless hour, that will raise your women intellectually, and make them more and more true companions for you as wives—companions able to understand your labours and sympathize with you in them, and by their sure instincts help you in your difficulties. Those of you who have made Science a special study will have many opportunities of using your knowledge for the benefit ofPage:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/548
1889.-Mr. D. Sinclair.
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