INDIAN EDUCATION
By THEODORE MORISON
In the eyes of the great majority of thoughtful Indians, education is the grand justification of British rule in India. Many of them cavil at our military expenditure, at our fiscal policy and our autocratic methods of administration, but even the most hostile critics of Indian government are whole-hearted advocates of English education, and persistently demand that a larger share of public money shall be spent upon diffusing European learning in India. It seems a strange anomaly that those who can see no good in anything done in India by Englishmen should at the same time be struggling most earnestly to make English ideas paramount among their own people, but of the fact there can be no question. I have heard an eminent Indian politician maintain throughout the evening that the English were draining all the wealth out of India, and yet in the end confess that the moral advantages of British rule more than compensated for this loss. This is not an empty phrase. It is not a conciliatory platitude to cover an awkward situation, but the expression of an intense conviction, often uttered by educated Indians, that the regeneration of their people depends upon the introduction into India of Western thought and Western education. European culture necessarily comes to them through the medium of English, and it is therefore to the great masters of English thought that their homage is chiefly paid. This is how they come to be such
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