M. E. Grant Duff

“ When History has become really studied amongst you, and it is, after all, the highest of studies, you will, while rejecting the exaggerations and dreams of those who claim for the ancestors of the Aryan conquerors, or colonizers of North India, a thousand virtues which they had not, be led to cling more and more to what is really good in your own past, and to rest wherever you do not see a proved necessity for change, "in the statutes of the land that gave you birth." ”

“ If I ventured to express an opinion on a matter quite small, when compared with many others you have to settle, I would say that he who could persuade his countrymen to give up their, to us, astounding expenditure on marriages, would do more for South India than any Government could do in a decade, but these questions are, as I said, for you. In the field of social reform, you may produce men as great as some of our political reformers of the West, but you will never produce anything great, by learning our political phraseology, and then applying it to circumstances entirely different. ”

“ When some misguided persons, however, insist that instead of obtaining every result of our long political struggles for the asking, —nay, not for the asking, we don't insist upon that but for the hinting a wish to have them, —you should be quite gratuitously cursed with all the clumsy machinery, which grim necessity, not choice, has obliged us to use, we may be permitted to smile, and to say to ourselves: "Is this all that these gentlemen have learned from the history taught in our colleges and schools?" ”

“ I wish as a British official to be absolutely neutral between these parties, but I cannot understand how any one who wishes for the good of India, should dream of desiring that any portion of the intelligence of the country should go dancing after this or that pseudo-political will-o'-the-wisp, while the mightiest social and religious questions, that have been debated for the last fifteen hundred years, are asking more and more loudly for an answer. ”

“ There is hardly a district in the Presidency, which does not contain scenery which people in Europe would go hundreds of miles to see, and of which the globe-trotter, pursuing his way over "the bare stony wolds of the Deccan," and the monotonous plains so common in Northern India, little dreams. Such a land well deserves that the best efforts of its inhabitants should be given, first, to make the most of its resources, and, secondly, to illustrate it by leading therein lives which may be useful to the world at large. ”

“ The answer to that observation is, that there is in India but scant material for any politics, worthy of the name.
What has given its great importance to political life in England and some other countries, is that they have been the pioneers of the world's progress in a great many matters of vast importance, connected with men's daily lives. They have had by endless debate, sometimes in the Council chamber, sometimes in Parliaments, often in the field, to work out the solution of a thousand puzzles, one more difficult than the other. ”

“ There is not recoverable probably from the Dravidian past, anything as valuable as that which has been found in the East Aryan past, and the value of the literary performances which Sanskrit embalms, considered merely in themselves, and not as the key to much of human history that was till lately unknown, has perhaps been overrated by those who went through the toil that was necessary to secure the prize.
Still, it is your manifest duty to recover for the world all that is recoverable of your early days. The real golden age for you, as for others, is not in the past, but in the future. ”

“ He was acquiring what is ever the chief function of all higher education to teach, —a system of art, viz., of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction in our every-day life—of so exclusively living in them that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift and debris of life, becomes as though it were not. ”

“ It is now as certain, as anything in the future can be, that,two hundred years hence, the race and language of Shakespeare, Burke and Byron will have beaten all other races and languages in the struggle for existence, but, good things as are our race and language, I, for one, should be very sorry to lose from the concert of humanity many other voices, and I should like to see the millions of Dravidians, who inhabit South India, taking all the good they can get from us, without ceasing to move on their old lines. ”

“ The service of Government is a very creditable calling, and we to whom the administration is at present confided have given practical proofs of our desire to see the number of graduates in the service of Government considerably increased.
Still, Government employment can only absorb a very limited number of you. Few things are more disastrous for a country, and few more flagitious in a Government, than to create places wholesale, to meet the wishes of aspirants to an income. ”

“ Let every man try to make his town or village the best drained, the best educated, the cleanest and the healthiest in the District, with the hardest and best shaded roads. Such work is not political in the sense in which that word is usually employed, but it is of untold importance to the Polis, the community.
Get wealth, get material civilization. These are the two maxims, which I wish to impress upon you in this part of my address. You will soon see that I do not consider that man lives by bread alone, or that even widely diffused physical well-being is the last word of human progress. ”

“ To one who has lived in the midst of them, it is indeed astounding to see the sort of heroism, with which some people charge into the middle of the most difficult and complicated subjects, on the authority of a telegram, which does not even pretend to do more than reflect the morning's gossip of this, or that, European capital, thousands and thousands of miles away. "Oh!" but some will observe, "there are Indian politics." ”

“ There is, however, outside the sphere of anything that can properly be called politics, a perfect world of labour, deeply exciting and interesting, lying ready for you.
Your foreign rulers have wisely shrunk from interfering, except on the rarest occasions, with your religious or with your social customs, but I am assured that the new ideas, which you are acquiring, have rendered many of you much dissatisfied with not a few of your time-honoured institutions. ”

“ You have been drinking now for a generation at the fountains of European knowledge. It is time you should begin to give Europe something in return. The very smallest additions to the stores of the Western men of learning, coming from the people of Southern India, will be, I am sure, not only thankfully, but rapturously, received. ”

“ If you deduct from the small balance of offices practically closed to natives those which must belong to Europeans, not in virtue of their being the descendants of conquerors, but in virtue of that education of ages, which has made the Aryan of the West what he is, the number of new appointments to be opened will be as nothing to those, who will desire to occupy them. I know there are people who say—"No doubt for the time, every race in India including the Aryans of the East, requires the guidance of the Aryans of the West, but a day will soon come when that will not be so." ”

“ Foolish Englishmen have often railed against their countrymen for not raising buildings in India like those of some of their predecessors, but I should like to know what would be said if any Indian ruler, even with the certainty of producing a building as beautiful as the Taj, suggested calling it into existence. Great works of that kind are amongst the most glorious possessions of Nations, but they imply, amidst many other things, either forced labour on the most gigantic scale, or the turning of almost all human energy towards the expression of thought in architecture. ”

“ It would be a dangerous thing to say this if I were not addressing those whom I believe to be inspired, even perhaps, too much inspired, with the Western passion for "getting on," albeit they think too much of "getting on" by the poor enough ladder of Government employment; but it is necessary to say it in order to put before you the kernel of my thoughts about the University. The world's work must be done —woe to those by whom the hard prosaic inevitable side of life is ever neglected ”

“ To the sciences of Comparative Philology and of Comparative Religion, one of the most gifted men who ever landed on the shores of India, I mean Sir Henry Maine, is on the way to add a third science, for which neither he nor any one else has exactly found a name, but which may be described as the early history of institutions as observed chiefly in India. I grudge, however, a little, though it is inevitable, that Aryan institutions, the institutions of early conquerors, should engross so much attention. ”

“ I do not refer to books of information that you may have published in those languages, books merely imparting a little of the knowledge of the West— they are good in their own way—but to books containing something that is at once new and striking, books adding, if it be only by one verse or one paragraph, to the things already existing in the world, which are acknowledged to be beautiful, or to be at once new, and true. ”

“ But what is to become of the unsuccessful candidates for Government employment? Education will absorb a respectable, and an ever-increasing, contingent, while the Bar will also absorb a good many.
Many of you seem to have a quite peculiar turn for law, and, as law in this country tends to conform itself always more and more, not only to written reason, but to intelligibly expressed written reason, the greater becomes its educative power over the community. The calm pressure of our Codes will do, I think, much for India, which saints and sages have failed to do. ”

“ England is the classic land of Parliamentary discussion, but even there, Parliament has only shown itself an admirable instrument, when broad issues were before the country. No one who has had his finger on the pulse of the machine, will say that it is a good, or anything but a detestable, instrument for the working out of schemes, which are good or bad, not according to the general conceptions, on which they are based, but according to the applicability to circumstances of a thousand detailed provisions. ”

“ These are all things which you should manage for yourselves without interference from Europeans, for you only can manage them well. All that the European can do is to point out where improvements can be made, where, for example, the graceful usages of one part of India may supersede with advantage the ungraceful usages of another, and so all advance by a process of indigenous growth, different from, but by no means necessarily inferior, nay often distinctly superior, to European works and ways. ”

“ Few profounder remarks have ever been made about politics, than one which was made by an eminent American, a citizen of the Great Republic: "We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education."
All sane persons in England rejoice, as one subject after another passes out of politics, and becomes the common property of both political parties. ”

“ The first sphere of labour then, outside the professions and other money-getting pursuits, which I would venture to suggest to you, is the bringing into harmony of your new thoughts, derived from us, and your old thoughts, derived from your ancestors, or from the non-European conquerors who have, at various times, settled down in India. In that field, you may become great and original. ”

“ It is not by their political machinery that Western countries have prospered, even where that machinery has been well contrived. It has been much more by ten thousand influences, trade, mining, manufactures, inventions, universities, books, learned societies, and what not, combining, in one or two exceptionally favoured countries, with well-contrived political institutions. Before the knowledge, which we bring you ready-made, can have its perfect work, your national life must be enriched in a vast number of ways, of which I am afraid many of you have not even begun to think. ”

“ Tinker and fidget as much as you will over forms of administration, the elementary truth remains that you can't get blood out of a stone. If India, or any other country under heaven, is to be really well-governed, it must be rich.
But to proceed on our quest of occupation for graduates—Politics, in their journalistic form, may give occupation to a few of you, but you are too far removed from the great centres of the world, to treat with much advantage of general politics. ”

“ It is to be hoped that the students of all the higher branches —such as applied mechanics, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, forestry—will possess that amount of general education which is implied by passing at least the Matriculation Examination of this University, not to say the First in Arts, but a great many youths whom nature never meant for University studies, will, it is hoped, turn aside from a road that can lead to nothing but grievous disappointment, and devote themselves to highly honourable and lucrative careers. ”