higher class of natives at the seats of government.  It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East.  It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian Empire.  Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.

“The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English furrier—­ astronomy, which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding-school—­history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long—­and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

“We are not without experience to guide us.  History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson.  There are in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society—­of prejudice overthrown—­of knowledge diffused—­of taste purified—­of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.

“The first instance to which I refer is the great revival of letters among the western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.  At that time almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing, and taught nothing at the universities, but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and romances in Norman French, would England have been what she now is?  What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.  The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity.  I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors.  In some departments—­in history, for example—­I am certain that it is much less so.