Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎526v] (177/238)

390 Proceedings of the East India Association.
trade in England during the past thirty years, and in all the artistic
denominations of textile manufacture, and in furniture and house decora
tion, was attributable ultimately to the writings of Ruskin and William
Morris, and the paintings of Rossetti, Millais, and others. While in India
he was an enthusiastic promoter of higher education ; but what was wanted
in India was that the higher education should not be developed after an
exclusively English type. One of the greatest of crimes against a people, and
the meanest wrong that could be perpetrated on them, was to dislocate the
continuity of their national culture and to destroy their historical and
literary personality. Therefore, wherever the people of India had, as in
the Madras Presidency The name given to each of the three divisions of the territory of the East India Company, and later the British Raj, on the Indian subcontinent. and in the Mahratta country, developed a great
literature of their own, the most scrupulous and strenuous care should be
taken that their higher education should be directed to its ever-increasing
cultivation. With reference to the administration of education in India, he
had always thought that it should be left more and more in the hands of
the people of India themselves. As for the Government expenditure on
education in India, he thought a million and a quarter a mere flea-bite. But
it was time to remember that there was an enormous reserve for educational
purposes—industrial, scientific, and literary—in the temple funds of India.
No Government could raise that question; but gradually as the modern
educated classes of Hindus became more and more influential, they would
bring their influence to bear on the present trustees of the temples, and
thus secure certain obvious and spontaneous reforms in the administration
of their vast funds, whereby they would be increasingly applied to the relief
of poverty and distress, and the promotion of education. The schools
would thus everywhere spring up within the sacred precincts of the tutelary
village temples, and there would be no more talk then of people being driven
by Joseph Butler s “ Analogy of Revealed Religion,” into atheism. Before
moving the formal vote of thanks to Sir Roland Wilson, he must renew his
protest against the repeated attacks on Sir William Lee-Warner's book.
He only wished it was available for use in the schools in England. He
did not know any other book from which students in any country could so
comprehensively and thoroughly learn their duties as citizens, and if they
were to have State-aided education in India, the Government of the
country were bound to instruct the people in their duties to the State, and
not only that, but in the duties of the State to the people; and the latter
was particularly necessary in a country where the acts of the Government
were constantly misrepresented, and that not so much through misunder
standings arising on the spot, as under deliberate instructions circulated by
political partisans in this country, the active crater of whose agitation lay
within the precinct of Westminster Abbey. In conclusion the Chairman
moved . That the most cordial thanks of the meeting be given to Sir
Roland Wilson for his valuable and most interesting paper.”
The resolution was carried by acclamation.
Sir Roland Wilson thanked the Chairman for the way in which he
had proposed the vote of thanks, and the meeting for the manner in
which it had been received. There were only two points he would notice
in his present reply. The first was that he should not like to go out to