THE FIRST ENGLISH SCHOOL IN INDIA.

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Æt. 24. means of saving the sinking institution from irretrievable ruin. The Government, when thus appealed to, did come forward and proffer its aid upon certain reasonable terms and conditions ; and it was in this way that the British Government was first brought into an active participation in the cause of English education.

"The Government then came forward and said in substance,

If you will allow us to appoint a duly qualified visitor, so as to give us some control over the course of instruction, we will help you with a considerable pecuniary grant.' But, however equitable the proposal that they, as large subscribers to the funds, should have an influential voice in the management, such was the blindfold bigotry of the larger moiety of the native committee, that the interposition of the Government, even in the mild form proposed, was at first very stoutly resisted. At length the sober sense of the smaller moiety prevailed. The first visitor happened to be Mr. Horace Hayman Wilson, the famous Sanscrit scholar. It was not, perhaps, an appointment altogether congenial to his other pursuits, he being thoroughly wrapped up in Sanscrit and Sanscrit lore of every sort. But still, as his influence with the natives was deservedly great, he was appointed to the office; and, as an honourable man, he rigorously resolved to do his duty. He very soon threw new life into the system, and got it very much improved; the number of pupils soon also greatly increased, so that altogether there was a great deal of zeal manifested, and a considerable degree of success attained. At the same time, so far as the Government were concerned, their views at the outset, with regard to the best mode of communicating European literature and science, were somewhat peculiar and contracted; in other words, their views seemed to be that whatever of European literature and science might be conveyed to the native mind should be conveyed chiefly through native media, that is to say, the learned languages of Indiafor the Muhammadans, Arabic and Persian; and for the Hindoos, Sanscrit. This was the predominant spirit and intent of the British Government."

The college, which had upwards of a hundred students and an endowment of £15,000 on Duff's arrival, lost all its capital in the commercial collapse

which occurred soon after. Then, too, perished the Calcutta School Society, established about the same time and on the same principles intolerant of Christianity. Its committee had, in 1823, opened an English school as a feeder to the college, in which it maintained thirty free students out of one hundred and twenty in attendance in 1829. The object was the then far-sighted one of encouraging the purely vernacular schools, in which the public subscriptions were more beneficially used, to train their pupils well in Bengalee before drafting them into English classes. But the fifth report of that society, and the official investigations of Mr. Adam soon after, show that there were not more than five thousand native children at school in the whole city of Calcutta when Duff landed. Not more than five hundred of these learned English, and that after the straitest sect of secularists of the Tom Paine stamp. Such was the educational destitution of Calcutta, low and high, seventeen years after the Clapham philanthropists had, through Parliament, forced the Court of Directors to promise to educate the natives.

Outside of Calcutta the few missionaries had made somewhat fitful attempts to use English as the best medium for the conveyance of truth. A Hindoo who was "almost a Christian," Jeynarain Ghosal, in 1814 left 20,000 rupees to found that college in Benares which the Church Missionary Society still conducts so well. In the same year, at Chinsurah, the London Missionary Society's agent, Mr. May, opened a high school, which received the first grant-in-aid. Helped by Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore, Dr. Marshman established many native schools in 1816; but it was in 1818 that the great college of the Serampore missionaries was projected to do on the Christian side what the Calcutta Hindoos were attempting on the purely recular. Unhappily, that was not in Calcutta. There

Æt. 24.

THE WORK OF DESTRUCTION BEGUN.

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suttee, infanticide, and the choking of the dying with Ganges mud were as common as in the time of its apostate founder, Job Charnock. Mr. G. Pearce, who landed there three years before Duff, as a missionary of the Baptist society, was even then required to report himself to the police and to make oath that he would behave himself peaceably. Sunday was blotted out of the calendar. Caste and idolatry revelled under the protection of the Company. Human sacrifices and Thug murder by strangling were common. Only four societies, represented by a dozen foreign missionaries, were at work in Calcutta and all Bengal : -the Baptist, the London, the Church, and the Orissa General Baptist. In 1827 there were only nine Baptist and half a dozen Anglican converts in all Calcutta, and of these but a portion were Hindoos, and one had. been a Muhammadan. This was the fruit of ten years' labour.

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Thus far the work of destruction had begun, and Hindoo hands had been the first to try to pull down their Dagon of falsehood, while Government officials had been active, more or less unconsciously, in propping it up. The Bengalees, beginning to leave even the glimmering and reflected light of natural religion as embodied in the varied concrete of their own system, were groping in the still darker region where all was doubt, where the old was gone and nothing had taken its place. Who was to arrest the demoralization? Who could so guide the fermenting process as to work into the mass the leaven which is slowly leavening the whole lump? Who should begin the work of construction side by side with that of a disintegration such as even the nihilists of the Hindoo College had not dared to dream of?

CHAPTER V.

1830-1831.

THE MINE PREPARED.

Preliminary Researches.-Duff's first Interview with Carey.-They Agree as to the best System of Aggression on Hindooism.-That System confirmed by Experience. Preparing the Mine and Setting the Train.—The Bible the Base and Crown of the System. -Why Previous Attempts Failed.-Buchanan's Christian Institution in the East.-Serampore College.-Bishop's College and Dr. Mill's Sanscrit Christiad.- All Providential Advantages centred in Duff.-His Bengalee Ally, the Raja Rammohun Roy, the Erasmus of Hindooism.-The Brumho Sobha and Dharma Sobha.-Duff's Treatment of Rammohun different from that by Dr. Marshman.-The Theist finds for the Christian a School and five Pupils. The first Day.-The Lord's Prayer and the Gospels in Bengalee.-Opposition of the other Missionaries.-Duff teaching the English Alphabet. Contemporaneous teaching of Bengalee and English. Removes to College Square. First Square.—First Public Examination of the School converts all Opporents.Branch Institution at Takee.-A new Educational Era in India.— Rev. W. S. Mackay joins Duff-Letter introducing Rammohun Roy to Dr. Chalmers.-Story of an English Adventurer.-Duff the first to teach Political Economy in India.-The Home Committee remonstrate, confounding it with Politics.

WITH the exhaustless energy which marked his whole life, Alexander Duff spent the hottest and wettest period of the Bengal year, the six weeks from the end of May to the middle of July, in preliminary inquiries. From early morning till latest eve he visited every missionary and mission station in and around Calcutta, from the southern villages on the skirts of the malarious Soonderbun forests to the older settlements of the Dutch at Chinsurah and the Danes at

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DUFF'S FIRST MEETING WITH CAREY.

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Serampore. There was not a school which he did not inspect; not one of those thatched bamboo and wickerwork chapels, in which apostolic men like Lacroix preached night and morning in Bengalee to the passersby in the crowded thoroughfares of the capital, in which he did not spend hours noting the people and the preaching alike. For he had at once begun that study of the vernacular without which half his knowledge of and sympathy with the natives must have been lost. He was especially careful to visit in detail representative rural villages, that he might satisfy himself and the committee. From such minute investigations, and from frequent conferences with the more experienced men already in the field, he arrived at two conclusions. These were, that Calcutta itself must be the scene of his earliest and principal efforts, from which he could best operate on the interior; and that the method of his operations must be different from that of all his predecessors in India.

With one exception the other missionaries discouraged these two conclusions. He had left to the last

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the aged Carey, then within three years of the close of the brightest of missionary careers up to that time, in order that he might lay his whole case before the man whose apostolic successor he was to be, even as Carey had carried on the continuity from Schwartz and the baptism of the first Protestant convert in 1707. Landing at the college ghaut one sweltering July day, the still ruddy Highlander strode up to the flight of steps that leads to the finest modern building in Asia. Turning to the left, he sought the study of Carey in the house-" built for angels" said one, so simple is it—where the greatest of missionary scholars was still working for India. There he beheld what seemed to be a little yellow old man in a white jacket, who tottered up to the visitor of whom he had already