Try and imagine for a moment, however absurd it may seem, what would have been the effect upon the brains of the youth of our own country if it had been subject to Chinese rule for the last 100 years, and the Chinese, without interfering with our own social customs or with our religious beliefs, had taken charge of higher education and insisted upon conveying to our youth a course of purely Chinese instruction imparted through Chinese text-books, and taught mainly by Englishmen, for the most part only one degree more familiar than their pupils with the inwardness of Chinese thought and Chinese ethics. The effect could hardly have been more bewildering than the effect produced in many cases similar to that which I have instanced on the brain of the Indian youth when he emerges from our schools and colleges.
It may be said that such cases are extreme cases, but extreme as they are, they are not exceptional. The exceptions must be sought rather amongst the small minority, who, in spite of all these drawbacks, display such a wonderful gift of assimilation, or, it might perhaps be more correctly termed, of intuition, that they are able to transport themselves into a new world of thought, or at any rate to see into it, as it were, through a glass darkly. But the number of those who possess this gift has probably always been small, and smaller still, with the reduction of the European element in the teaching staff, is the number growing of those who have a fair chance of developing that gift, even if nature has endowed them with it. A comparison of the Census Report of 1901 with the figures given in the Educational Statistics for 1901-2 shows that the total number of Europeans then engaged in Indian educational work was barely, 500, of whom less than half were employed by Government, whilst that of the Indians engaged in similar work in colleges and secondary schools alone was about 27,500. As the number of Indian students and scholars receiving higher education amounts to three-quarters of a million, it is obvious that so slight a European leaven, whatever its quality--and its quality is not always what it should be--can produce but little impression upon so huge a mass.