416 EARLIER INDIAN SPEECHES
English literature should be opened alike to men and women, I submit in all humility that there is some misapprehension in assuming such an attitude. No one intends to closs these treasures against women while keeping them open for men. There is none on earth able to prevent you from studying the literature of the whole world if you are fond of literary tastes. But when courses of education have been framed with the needs of a particular society in view, you cannot supply the re- quirements of the few who have cultivated a literary taste. In asking our men and women to spend less time in the study of English than they are doing now, my ob- ject is not to deprive them of the pleasure which they are likely to derive from it, but I hold that the same pleasure can be obtained at less cost and trouble it we follow a more natural method. The world is full of many a gem of priceless beauty ; but then these gems are not a*ll of English setting. Other languages can well boast of productions of similar excellence; all these should be made available for our common people and that can only be done if our own learned men will undertake to translate them for us in our own languages.
UNSPEAKABLE SIN OF CHILD MARRIAGE.
Merely to have outlined a scheme of education as above is not to have removed the bane of child marri- age from our society or to have conferred on our women an equality of rights. Let us now consider the case of our girls who disappear, so to say, from view, after marriage. They are not likely to return to our schools. Conscious of the unspeakable and unthinkable sin of the child marriage of their daughters, their mothers cannot think of educating them or of otherwise making
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