It may be said that such cases are extreme cases, but extreme as they are, they are not exceptional.  The exceptions must be sought rather amongst the small minority, who, in spite of all these drawbacks, display such a wonderful gift of assimilation, or, it might perhaps be more correctly termed, of intuition, that they are able to transport themselves into a new world of thought, or at any rate to see into it, as it were, through a glass darkly.  But the number of those who possess this gift has probably always been small, and smaller still, with the reduction of the European element in the teaching staff, is the number growing of those who have a fair chance of developing that gift, even if nature has endowed them with it.  A comparison of the Census Report of 1901 with the figures given in the Educational Statistics for 1901-2 shows that the total number of Europeans then engaged in Indian educational work was barely, 500, of whom less than half were employed by Government, whilst that of the Indians engaged in similar work in colleges and secondary schools alone was about 27,500.  As the number of Indian students and scholars receiving higher education amounts to three-quarters of a million, it is obvious that so slight a European leaven, whatever its quality—­and its quality is not always what it should be—­can produce but little impression upon so huge a mass.

Our present system of Indian education in fact presents in an exaggerated form, from the point of view of the cultivation of the intellect, most of the defects alleged against a classical education by its bitterest opponents in Western countries, where, after all, the classics form only a part, however important, of the curriculum, and neither Latin nor Greek is the only medium for the teaching of every subject.  From the point of view of the formation of character according to Western standards, and even from that of physical improvement, the case is even worse.  In Western countries the education given in our schools, from the Board school to the University, is always more or less on the same plane as that of the class from which the boys who attend them are drawn.  It is merely the continuation and the complement of the education our children receive in their own homes from the moment of their birth, and it moves on the same lines as the world in which they live and move and have their being.  In India, with rare exceptions, it is not so, but exactly the reverse.

On the deficiencies of the system, from the moral point of view, a new and terribly lurid light has been shed within the last few years.  There has been no more deplorable feature in the present political agitation than the active part taken in it by Indian schoolboys and students.  It has been a prominent feature everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the Bengal provinces, where from the very outset of the boycott movement in 1905 picketing of the most aggressive character was conducted by bands of young Hindus who ought to have been doing their lessons.  That was only the beginning, and the state of utter demoralization that was ultimately reached may be gathered from the following statements in the last Provincial Report on Education (1908-9), issued by the Government of Eastern Bengal:—­