civilization.  Good government represents to that extent a process of conservation; good education must be partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process.  Yet upon the more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon administrative problems in India.  The purpose we have had in view is presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his last address to the University of Calcutta as “the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State.”  But is it a purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have kept steadily before them?  Is it a purpose that could possibly be achieved by the laisser faire policy of the State in regard to the moral and religious side of education?  If so, how is it that we have had of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it?

The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western countries, which rely upon a highly-developed code of ethics and an inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of religious sanctions.  In India, as almost everywhere in the East, religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant force in the life both of every individual and of every separate community to which the individual belongs.  Religion is, in fact, the basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of Western-educated Indians.  Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian youth independently of all religious teaching, it could only result in failure.  For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion governs life from the hour of his birth to that of his death.  His birth and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences inexorably governed by religion.  His religion may seem to us to consist chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher spiritual life.  But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely his religion permeates his existence.  The whole world in which he lives and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the sublime.