104 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [May, 



acquisition, and my broken English this night will convince you 

 how unsuccessful have been my labours." Referring to the rules 

 of the Calcutta University, he said that a course of nine or ten years 

 was necessary to give a sufficient knowledge of the English language, 

 to enable a boy to begin the study of the sciences. Now, as language 

 was but a means and not an end, and as men did not learn it for its 

 own sake, but for the knowledge that was to be acquired through its 

 medium, that language must make the best medium of education 

 which was acquired the easiest ; and as the vernacular of a nation 

 was acquired without any labour or exertion, as it grew with its 

 growth, and ripened with its maturity — a part and parcel of its exist- 

 ence — it was infinitely better adapted to make learning easy, than the 

 English which could not be learned in less than ten years. The car- 

 penter who begins by mining the crude ore, smelting his iron, and 

 forging his chisel, before commencing upon a table, will be far behind 

 him who takes up a ready made chisel in the market ; and the 

 table that will be turned out by the latter will be incomparably su- 

 perior to that of the former. And what was true of the carpenter 

 and his chisel, was equally so of the scholar and the instrument of his 

 learning. The man who would take up a language ready to his hand, 

 would be far more successful in his studies, than he who would devote 

 a whole decade of years to its acquisition. It may be said that when 

 the English has been naturalised in this country, it would come home 

 to the people, just as well as the vernacular. But to wait for that 

 time, would be to indefinitely postpone their education. A hundred 

 years of British rule in India had not yet taught more than one in ten 

 thousands of the native inhabitants to speak the English language. ' 

 Seven centuries of Moslem supremacy in this country, instead of up- 

 rooting the vernaculars, served only to make the conquerors give up 

 their own in favour of an Indian tongue — the Hindi. For moro than 

 three centuries the Norman French was the language of the court and 

 of the camp, of business and of fashion, in England, and yet it failed 

 to supplant the old Saxon. The Romans, those great masters of 

 political government, had before that time made it a point of state 

 policy, and an instrument of police, to suppress the language of their 

 subject nations, but never succeeded in destroying a single language 

 of any extent. The Teutonic was still the basis of the English, dcs- 



