CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 3 



as elsewhere feeling its way towards readjustment to the 

 times. Mahommedans here, too, as nearly always tinged 

 by their Hindu surroundings, are moving along with them. 



But East Bengal people are by no means all a gentle 

 peasant folk, responsive to religion and education. The 

 great rivers introduce strong elements of movement and 

 enterprise, of fishery and transport ; in various ways stimu- 

 lating, adventurous, unsettling, even to the peasant villages. 

 The contrast, the mingling and the clashing of peasant 

 and fisher populations, so deeply formative throughout 

 the history of Mediterranean and Western Europe, have 

 long been here in evidence, though of course on the 

 smaller scale of a river system as compared with seas and 

 coasts, and thus operative on the small scale instead of the 

 great. Peasant prosperity was advanced by easy transports, 

 and vigour and wellbeing improved by fish diet. The 

 villagers were also relieved of their more restive young 

 spirits by the call of the rivers, with their long perspectives 

 promising freer and more adventurous careers. 



But beside the elements of sport and luck which give 

 charm to the fisher life, and the more ambitious lure of gain, 

 even comparative fortune, through transports and commerce, 

 these rivers have an old and evil reputation for dacoity ; 

 for such robberies they notably facilitate, since their 

 numberless creeks and adjacent jungles afford sally-ports 

 and refuges by turns. Here then we have the conditions at 

 once for agricultural and riverine villages in prosperity, but 

 also for a vigorous lawless class, who find these villages 

 worth robbing. Yet the robbers never became strong 

 enough to dominate their district : for even apart from the 

 vigilance and repression of governments, the water-thief 

 and pirate cannot venture far from his boat. Thus his 

 depredations were but sufficient only to produce watchful- 

 ness in the villages, with frequent and ready defence and 

 resistance, attack and pursuit, in turn. In short, such 

 villagers tend to be roused beyond the plodding life of the 

 peasant, which is too readily acceptant of life's ills ; and 



