One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1833.  The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on the Indian point of view.  It admitted frankly that “Indians were alive to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive government,” and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence had been given to show “that such exclusion is not warranted on the score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or trustworthiness.”  Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament laid it down that “no native of the said Indian territories, nor any natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company.”  This was the first substantial promise given to India that British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however beneficent, of alien rulers.  It invited the co-operation of the subject race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission.  It heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without which the promise would have been empty.

The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to provide out of the Company’s funds for the maintenance of indigenous educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education.  But long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education.  The champions of English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff, a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay’s famous Minute of March 7, 1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of English as essential to the spread of Western education.  One of the immediate objects in view—­and incidentally as a measure of economy—­was undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the administrative and judicial services of the Company.  But if Macaulay was quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means blind to the larger implications of