Lest I may be accused of exaggeration or bias, I will appeal here to the testimony of Dr. Garfield Williams, a missionary of the highest repute and experience, and in profound sympathy with the natives of India.  Speaking at the Missionary Conference at Calcutta last winter, he said:—­

The conditions and environment of the student in Calcutta are such as to make the formation of character almost impossible....  He is not a student in the best sense of the word, for he has not the scholarly instincts of a student—­ I speak, of course, of the average student, not of the exceptional one.  His parents send him to the University to pass one or two examinations, and these have to be passed in order to enable him to attain a higher salary....  His work is sheer “grind.”  The acquisition of good notes for lectures is the first essential for him, and the professor who gives good clear-cut notes so that a man can dispense with any text-books is the popular professor—­and for two reasons:  first of all, it saves the expense of buying the text-book, and then, of course, it helps to get through the examination.  That is a reason why two boys of the same village will go to different colleges because they can then “swap” notes.  It is a very rare thing for a student to have money enough to buy more than one of the suggested books on a given subject for examination.  He learns by heart one book and the notes of lectures of two or three of the favourite professors in Calcutta.  There is many a man who has even got through his examinations without any text-book of any kind to help him, simply by committing to memory volumes of lecture notes....  I know of no student who labours more strenuously than the Bengalee student.  The question is how to prevent this ridiculous wastage of students; how to prevent the production of this disappointed man who is a student only in name.  He never had any desire to be a student in nature; he was brought up without that desire ... and indeed, if he be a boy with real scholarly instincts, and he happens to fail in his examinations, it makes it all the worse, for his parents will not recognize those scholarly instincts of his—­all they want is a quick return for the money spent on his education, and he will have to make that return from a Rs.30 salary instead of a Rs.50 one.

Can there be anything more pathetic and more alarming than the picture that Dr. Williams draws of the student’s actual life?—­

He gets up about 6, and having dressed (which is not a long process) he starts work.  Until 10, if you go into his mess, you will see him “grinding” away at his text-book, under the most amazing conditions for work—­usually stretched out upon his bed or sitting on the side of it.  The room is almost always shared with some other occupant, usually with two or three or more other occupants, mostly engaged in the same task if they are students.  At 10 the boy gets some food, and then goes of to his college for