“The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers.  On the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to work with their hands.  The form which discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially in a Government office.  The village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father’s workshop.  Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school.”

The little book which I am quoting from is called “Indo-Anglian Literature,” and is well stocked with “baboo” English—­clerkly English, hooky English, acquired in the schools.  Some of it is very funny, —­almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and free.  If I were going to quote good English—­but I am not.  India is well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best of us.  I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at the use of our tongue.  There are many letters in the book; poverty imploring help—­bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant’s unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties of kinship.  Among us I think there is nothing approaching it.  Strange as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule, that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it.  In the following letter “father” is not to be read literally.  In Ceylon a little native beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was mistaken.  I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.

     “Sir,

“I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy I have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy good sight, you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is your wish I am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you my father I am your son this understand what is your wish.

     “Your Sirvent, P. C. B.”

Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character.  It is common in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the white man’s soft religious side; even this poor boy baits his hook with a macerated Bible-text in the hope that it may catch something if all else fail.