H. S. Cunningham

“ Gentlemen, let us apply Milton's language of courage and hope to your own case, and think of India as the mighty and puissant nation, rousing herself, after her long, long sleep, purging and unsealing her long-abused sight, and preparing herself, as I pray God she may, to enter upon a nobler and happier cycle of existence than ever yet has dawned upon her. ”

“ To the real student, of course, to ask him why he likes education, is to ask him why he likes light rather than darkness and life than death. With his books he lives a higher and nobler life than the present gives him. ”

“ What custom wills, in all things should we do it, The dust on antique Time would lie unswept, And mountainous Error be too highly heaped For Truth to overpeer— But still there is a great danger as well as great pain in leaving the old customary paths in which so many preceding generations walked. The old belief, with all its venerated associations, learnt from our childhood, seems to form part of a man's very heart, and, true or false, to lose it, is to lose a portion of himself. ”

“ His untrammelled soul communes with the wisest and best men of his own day, and with them both in their happiest moments : he feels the pleasant excitement of intellectual effort : he experiences the charm of difficulty grappled with and overcome; he climbs, exhilirated with past success, from one vantage ground of truth to another, sees an ever-increasing area at his feet, and welcomes new light into his soul. ”

“ Imagine a venerable city, standing amid sweet English meadows, embowered in immemorial trees, washed by the waters of a classic stream— picture to yourselves her streets flanked not by the emporia of trade but by solemn shrines and time-encrusted colleges, redolent with the piety and learning of 1,000 years ”

“ Robertson's most interesting report on Indian Agriculture, and see how science, which is only a grand word for common sense and accurate information, would enrich him if he would let her; how he might have bigger crops and more of them, and better and more productive cattle, and how ignorance makes him attempt what he never ought, and leave unattempted the thing he might do with profit, and do the right thing in the wrong and costly way, and in fact, commit all the blunders that ignorance and empiricism must, till science comes to lend her aid. ”

“ Then as to happiness, what pleasure lost, what beauties unperceived, what a stupid, brute-like, uninteresting affair does life become to the man who walks through it with his eyes shut to its wonders and beauties. ”

“ Arnold, the Epicurean man of letters; a great collection of orators, statesmen, philosophers; men of art and science—what collected them there? What united men otherwise so diverse in taste and opinion? What but a common piety to their Alma Mater, a common allegiance to the place where they first learnt to think, first experienced the rapture of truth, first listened to the strains of philosophy, "not stern and rugged as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute," first learnt how many, and how ennobling are the pleasures with which learning rewards her sons. ”

“ In India, it has been far otherwise. We look back to a remote period in the very dawn of history, and we find her in the van of civilization. We find a branch of that happy and noble Aryan community from which you and we, gentlemen, take our rise, practising many of the amenities and all the virtues of civilized life at a time when most of what is now regarded as the civilized world was sunk in barbarism. ”

“ Art in its fairest forms, science with its train of wonders, literature with its thousand delights, will to the man without moral sense but make the absence of that moral sense the more apparent. And remember that while there is endless diversity as to dogma, that diversity does not extend to the world of morals, and while theologians are hopelessly at variance about their respective creeds, there is no such variance among good and reasonable men as to how we ought to live and what objects we ought to propose to ourselves. ”

“ Ignorance "the curse of God " It is, perhaps, hardly respectful to so lettered an audience as that which I address even to consider such a question. But if an answer were necessary, the first would be that ignorance is a highly expensive luxury, and that India, having only fifty millions a year and a great deal to do with them, cannot afford to be ignorant. It is "the curse of God;" it costs lives, it costs money, it costs happiness. ”

“ Whenever we violate the laws of nature, whether intentionally or not, we suffer at once. A knowledge of laws of nature. For half the ills of life there is a remedy or a protection could we only find it. Take the simplest of all matter, the water we drink. Calcutta was at one time the perennial home of cholera, one of the fountain heads from which that fell disease constantly started to devastate mankind. The water available for drinking was, every scientific man declared, sufficient to dispose everyone to disease, and to spread, if not to originate it. ”

“ Virtue and vice have the same meanings to us all. Honesty and justice and truth—that much neglected virtue, candour of intellect—purity of soul and body—magnanimity on the one hand, and mercy and generosity and self-devotion on the other—these are the same to all alike, these are the real landmarks by which our course must be steered ”

“ And not only must our culture be practically useful, but those who receive it must beware of the dangers and responsibilities which it entails. In the first place there is the danger incidental to all great unsettlements of thought and sudden inroads of new ideas, and the shock which is thus given to society. History of India and its exceptional nature. In this respect the History of India has been exceptional. In most nations the progress of a nation in culture has been gradual ”

“ Men, when first the curtain rises upon the stage of history, are wretched, trembling beings, a rather inferior sort of wild beasts, snatching a precarious livelihood from shell-fish or berries, exposed to untold hardships, brutalized by the most degrading customs, frequently exterminated in the unequal conflict with disease, misery and wild animals more powerful and courageous than themselves. ”

“ India, however, appears at an early date to have entered upon a cycle of national existence in which progress found no place, and to have remained stationary while the nations of the West sprang into being and took up the running. The structure of society admitted of little change, and the prevailing theologies discouraged the desire for it. India was one of the stationary powers of the world. ”

“ The most important education is what a man gives himself. We want to see in you independent thought; what is wanted for India is a class of independent and high principled, courageous men who will form an enlightened public opinion. Many things are done badly or left undone, because Government is afraid to move without more guidance from public opinion than it at present receives ”

“ By slow and painful degrees the race mounts up and culminates at last in the fully civilized man. Each step in the ascent is a piece of knowledge, a further acquaintance with the working of the world's machinery and the rules according to which the world around us proceeds, and so a better mastery over natural results. ”

“ But these are only three among all the thousands of cities and towns in India, and in many of them, Delhi is one I remember, the death-rate is awfully high, and the cause has been distinctly traced by men of science to impure water. Generally you may be sure that wherever you have a town population, drinking out of wells, a considerable percentage of them is poisoned every year, and a still larger percentage condemned to the misery of enfeebled health. This is a needless waste of life to be debited to ignorance. ”

“ And in wishing you well, we wish well to the country at large, for with you and such as you lie the hopes of the India of the future. It is here, in the educated classes, in the thinking, knowing, reading portion of the community, that is to be found the real outcome of our administration and the true test of its success. ”

“ It is not when men doubt the dogmatic and philosophical parts of their creed s,but when moral truths are obscured that individuals become corrupt and nations sink into infamy. Education may, and probably will, make a man question his creed—it never need make him doubt about his conduct. Let a student remember this, and that everything he learns should tend towards ennobling himself and bettering the world about him, and there need be no fear for the result. ”

“ Underneath these different religions, yours and ours, and nearer the surface perhaps than theologians would have us believe, lie certain common aspirations, common cravings, common pangs, and the man who ignores them, ignores the highest part about himself and is on the high road to a degrading materialism. ”

“ Fired with the noble acts of other men, he resolves that he will do something to benefit and ennoble mankind; he thrills with the promptings of an honourable ambition, that last infirmity of noble minds. ”

“ Do not forget that if, from the circumstances of the case we are debarred from offering you instruction in many of the deeper, graver, and more serious aspects of life, none the less do those aspects exist, and none the more safely can they be ignored by you. ”

“ These are the pleasures for which he is content to live and labor, for these he rejects the ignominious joys of sense; for them he scorns delights and lives laborious days, or rather in them he finds his greatest delight and his best repose. ”