the estrangement of the rising generation committed to their charge.  Some men, no doubt, rise superior to all these adverse conditions and, in comparing the men of the present day with those of the past, one is apt to remember only the few whose names still live in the educational annals of India and to forget the many who have passed away without making any mark.  The fact, however, remains that nowadays the Europeans who have the greatest influence over their Indian pupils are chiefly to be found amongst the missionaries with whom teaching is not so much a profession as a vocation.

CHAPTER XIX.

SOME MEASURES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM.

Though already in 1889, when Lord Lansdowne was Viceroy, an important resolution, drafted by Sir Anthony (now Lord) MacDonnell as Secretary to Government, was issued, drawing attention to some of the most glaring defects of our educational system from the point of view of intellectual training and of discipline, and containing valuable recommendations for remedying them, it seems to have had very little practical effect.  A more fruitful attempt to deal with the question was made during Lord Curzon’s Viceroyalty.  He summoned and presided over an Educational Conference, of which the results were embodied in a Government Resolution issued on March 11, 1904, and in the Universities Act of the same year.  They were received at the time with a violent outburst of indignation by Indian politicians, who claim to represent the educated intellect of the country.  The least that Lord Curzon was charged with was a deliberate attempt to throttle higher education in India.  This factious outcry has now died away, except amongst the irreconcilables, and Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, an authority whom even Hindu partisanship can hardly repudiate, declared in his last Convocation speech that the new regulations which are now being brought into operation, far from bearing out the apprehensions of “alarmist prophets,” have been distinctly beneficial to the better and stronger class of students.

To summarize very briefly the work of the Conference, it recognized in the first place the importance of the vernaculars as the proper medium for instruction in the lower stages of education, whilst maintaining the supremacy of English in the higher stages.  It sought to give a more practical character to high-school training by promoting the “modern side,” hitherto overshadowed by a mainly literary curriculum, and it endeavoured to make the school courses self-sufficing and self-contained instead of merely a stepping-stone to the University courses.  To this end secondary schools were encouraged to give more importance to School Final Examinations as a general test of proficiency and not to regard their courses as almost exclusively preparatory to the University Entrance Examination.  Great stress was also laid upon the improvement of training colleges for teachers as well as upon the