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JOHN RUSSELL COLVIN

desired. It calls out the exercise of memory, of imagination, of literary skill, rather than the faculty of reasoning. It is opposed to that discipline of exactness, by which imaginative minds are sobered. The Colleges and Universities turn out men who declaim in English with the fatal facility of those whose matter is below the standard of their manner. They have equipped themselves with the art of the orator and the trick of the journalist. But, moving on the surface of things, they come perilously near to be charlatans. Their imitative powers are a snare and a stumbling block to them; for to speak other men's thought, in other men's tongues, they have bartered their own identity. With fellow-subjects from the West who are but slightly acquainted with them, they pass readily for true metal. But to those who are more familiar with them, the defects of their mental character seem encouraged by their training. 'The fact is,' said the late Sir Henry Maine, in one of his addresses to the University of Calcutta, 'that the educated native mind requires hardening. That culture of the imagination, that tenderness for it which may be necessary in the West, is out of place here; for this is a society in which, for centuries upon centuries, the imagination has run riot; and much of the intellectual weakness, and moral evil which afflict it to this moment, may be traced to imagination having so long usurped the place of reason.' Yet, as there was division in 1835, so is there a division now. Few would propose to recall Arabic or Sanskrit to redress