HINDOO LITERATURE. 
31 
those divisions tend to encourage and maintain, were 
kept in abeyance by the wisdom formerly dissemi- 
nated, and by the national education then extended 
to all classes of the community. The people were 
too well informed to succumb to degradation, of which 
they at once saw the injustice, and which they felt 
that they possessed mental energies to avert. 
Nothing can be a greater delusion than to form an 
opinion of the intellectual celebrity which the Hindoos 
once enjoyed by their present ignorant and degraded 
state. Their social condition is now as deplorable as 
it was once elevated and enlightened. The acqui- 
sition of knowledge was as generally as it was success- 
fully pursued ; and the first anxiety of the parent 
toward his children was to see them furnished with 
the necessary means of acquiring that knowledge 
then esteemed the richest earthly treasure. An ex- 
tract from a letter of Sir Alexander Johnston, a 
high authority upon all subjects connected with Ori- 
ental literature, addressed to Mr. Charles Grant, 
when President of the Board of Control, will help 
to justify what I have stated upon the intellectual 
attainments of the Hindoos, before the Mahomedan 
conquests. 
Education has always, from the earliest period of 
their history, been an object of public care and of 
public interest to the Hindoo governments on the pe- 
ninsula of India. Every well-regulated village under 
those governments had a public school and a public 
schoolmaster. The system of instruction in them was 
that which, in consequence of its efficiency, simplicity, 
and cheapness, was a few years ago introduced from 
