INTRODUCTION TO MISSION WORK 9 



millions. When an Indian college admits Mohammedan 

 students it is compelled to allow them to observe their 

 own religious holidays and festivals. Again, India is 

 the only country which has any very considerable Hindu 

 population. At the last census this population numbered 

 over two hundred and twenty millions, more in fact 

 than the total of all the Protestant Christians in the 

 world to-day. The Hindu students must also be free to 

 observe their religious holidaj^s. With the different 

 Christian holidays added, including Sunday of course, 

 the college term is somewhat broken up, and the Indian 

 student, being in most things not unlike his fellow 

 students the world over, takes full advantage of every 

 holiday. I often recall a remark of President W. 0. 

 Thompson of Ohio State University, that education is 

 the one commodity sold in America for which the pur- 

 chaser is glad to receive less than he has paid for. 

 The greater the number of holidays, the better the 

 student likes it. 



Realizing the difficulties which I have mentioned, of 

 studying in a foreign language, and having an inexperi- 

 enced teacher, the students agreed to give up some of 

 these numerous holidays, in order that we might take 

 trips together to study economic conditions in the neigh- 

 borhood. Together we visited the workshops of the 

 East India Railway and realized how human labor had 

 been reduced to minimum through the use of power, how 

 the inventive genius of man is multiplying his own ca- 

 pacity and at the same time ridding human labor of 

 its most forbidding drudgery. When they saw a pair 

 of locomotive driving wheels on a lathe in a room where 

 hardly a sound could be heard, they stood amazed at 

 the exhibition of such tremendous power applied in 



