Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎525v] (175/238)

388 Proceedings of the East hidia Association.
not sure that Sir Roland Wilson’s opinion was not right, that that might
now be left to the people of India themselves. Throughout India the
commercial and professional classes were numerous and comparatively well
off, and in every province there were two or three rupee-millionaires. If
the Government would distinguish with titles and in other ways persons
who gave large educational benefactions, he was certain that in a short
time they would have in every province not one, but half a dozen
Carnegies! (Hear, hear.)
Sir Charles Stevens said he agreed with Mr. Rees as to the impossi
bility of applying an English standard to the condition of the natives of
India. The first thing that struck him in Sir Roland Wilson’s paper was
the absence of detail as to facts, and an absence of discrimination between
different classes of education and of schools. No distinction was drawn
between educational establishments which were directly managed as
Government schools, and those which were technically spoken of as grant-
in-aid institutions. It is conceivable that it might be perfectly right for
the Government to maintain, for instance, agricultural or technical schools,
or to take up schools in particular localities for particular classes of people,
and still not advisable for them to manage, or even aid, schools in other
localities or among other classes of people ; it did not at all follow that an
argument applicable to one class of schools was equally applicable to all.
Sir Roland Wilson had quoted descriptions by Mr. Carstairs of the system
of school inspection with which he (Sir Charles Stevens) could not agree.
It certainly did not represent his own experience of the state of affairs in
Bengal. The lowest class of inspecting officers (the sub-inspectors)
inspected the lower schools. The deputy-inspectors supervised the sub
inspectors and inspected some of the lower schools, while they themselves
also inspected higher schools. They in turn were supervised by the
inspectors, who had large tracts of country under them, and who inspected
some of all sorts of schools except (he believed) the collegiate schools. He
was altogether opposed to the withdrawal of State aid from education in
India, and he thought Sir Roland Wilson had for the moment forgotten
how the educational system did not stand apart, but was bound up in the
whole administration of the country. It was admitted that the preservation
of order was the first consideration. How was the Government to insist on
the provision of efficient magistrates, police officers, civil judges ? Doctors,
lawyers, engineers, and other professional men, must be educated, if only
to carry on the administration; the Government has, therefore, a direct
interest in the matter, and, in the speaker’s opinion, mere commercial
competition could not be depended upon to give the necessary men.
With reference to primary schools, he strongly approved of the work that
had been begun in Bengal by Sir George Campbell, of bringing the old
indigenous schools into touch with the Education Department and im
proving the teachers. He illustrated the danger and difficulty arising from
the want of instruction of this sort by referring to the taking of the census
in 1881 among the Sonthals of the Birbhum District, and to the discon
tent which he had personally traced to the bad treatment of the Sonthals by
some enterprising Bengalis, who had taken advantage of their ignorance