Lord Mayo, on his arrival in India, found two distinct sets of views entertained in regard to education. In some Provinces, among which Bombay held an honourable place, successful efforts had been made to found Public Instruction on a popular basis. In other Provinces—conspicuously in Bengal—high-class education flourished, while scanty provision was made for the primary or indigenous schools. The ultimate effect of this latter system, it was urged, would 'filtrate' downwards. Its immediate result, however, was to arm the rich and the powerful with a new weapon—knowledge—and to leave the poor under their old weight of ignorance in their struggle for life. Lord Mayo threw himself with characteristic energy into the efforts which were being made to remedy this state of things.
'I dislike,' he wrote to a friend, 'this filtration theory. In Bengal we are educating in English a few hundred Bábus at great expense to the State. Many of them are well able to pay for themselves, and have no other object in learning than to qualify for Government employ. In the meanwhile we have done nothing towards extending knowledge to the million. The Bábus will never do it. The more education you give them, the more they will keep to themselves, and make their increased knowledge a means of tyranny. If you wait till the bad English, which the 400 Bábus learn in Calcutta, filters down into the 40,000,000 of Bengal, you will be ultimately a Silurian rock instead of a retired judge. Let the Bábus learn English by all means. But let us also try to do something towards teaching the three R's to "Rural Bengal."'1
1 Referring to The Annals of Rural Bengal, which he had read on his voyage out to India.
The credit of giving effect to the measures then inaugurated belongs to Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. His educational reforms mark a new era in that Province.
In 1870 the Department of Public Instruction was educating 163,854 children in Lower Bengal at a cost of £186,598 to the State. In 1874, when Sir George Campbell laid down the Lieutenant-Governorship, he left 400,721 children being educated at a cost to Government of £228,151. He had, in the interval, covered Bengal with primary schools; pieced together and resuscitated the old indigenous mechanism of rural instruction, and, without actually curtailing high-class education, had created a bonâ fide system of public instruction for the people of the country.
While Lord Mayo believed that State education in India must rest on the broad basis of the indigenous and village school, he also recognised the necessity of making special allowance for certain classes. The Muhammadans—the old ruling class in India—had fallen behind in the race of life under the British system of Public Instruction. Lord Mayo discerned clearly how far this result was due to their own neglect, and how far to the unsuitability or uncongeniality of our educational methods. He urged upon the Local Governments the necessity of making special provision to meet their wants; and the reforms on the lines which he indicated have done much to remove the difficulty.
For another, and an even more backward class, Lord Mayo showed an equal consideration. He perceived that the Poor White had become a grave administrative problem in India. The truth is, our whole system of State instruction in India had been designed, and rightly designed, for the Natives. The poorer classes of the European community were very inadequately provided for by the Government. Lord Mayo thought that the first thing to be done was to place the existing schools for European children on a sound and efficient basis before building new ones. I have already referred to the Commission of inquiry and reform which he appointed for the Lawrence Asylums. In the Presidency towns, he exerted his influence, to use his own words, 'to increase the means of instruction for the Christian poor, and especially of the class immediately above the poorest.' But his life was cut short before he could accomplish the object which he had at heart.
While Lord Mayo thus provided for the wider instruction of the people of India, he also laboured to educate their rulers. At the time of his accession, the Government did not know the population of a single District of its most advanced Province, and the first census of Bengal (taken under Lord Mayo's orders) unexpectedly disclosed an extra population of twenty-six millions, whose existence had never been suspected, in that Lieutenant-Governorship alone.
No data were available up to that time for estimating the practical effects which any natural calamity would have upon a Bengal District. In 1866, when famine burst upon the Bengal seaboard, the Government remained unaware that the calamity was imminent until it had become irremediable, and scarcity had passed into starvation. The proportion which the crops of a Province bears to its food requirements, the movements of its internal or external trade, all the statistics of the operations by which wealth is distributed or amassed, and by which the necessities of one part of the country are redressed from the superfluities of another, remained unknown factors in administrative calculations of the most important practical sort.