For the perfect irrigation of learning, a foreign language cannot be a true medium. This is a truism, whose utterance would bore men to sleep, or to something worse, in any other part of the world; but in our country truisms appear as dangerous heresies, rousing our phlegmatic souls into active hostility. Therefore, for us, all truisms are a tonic, though we relish platitudes far better. And this makes me bold to reiterate that when we are compelled to learn through the medium of English, the knocking at the gate and turning of the key take away the best part of our life. The feast may be waiting for us inside the room, but the difficulty and delay of admission spoil our appetite and the long privation permanently injures our stomach. The ideas are very late in coming to us, and the tediously long trial of our teeth over the grinding of the grammar, and a system of spelling, which is devoid of all conscience, takes away our relish for the food when it does come at last.

If you want to grow a tree on the sandy soil of a rainless desert, then you not only have to borrow your seed from some distant land, but also the soil itself and the water. Yet, after the immense trouble you have taken, the tree grows up miserably stunted; and even if it does bear fruit, the seeds do not mature. The education which we receive from our universities takes it for granted that it is for cultivating ahopeless desert, and that not only the mental outlook and the knowledge, but also the whole language must bodily be imported from across the sea. And this makes our education so nebulously distant and unreal, so detached from all our associations of life, so terribly costly to us in time, health and means, and yet so meagre of results.

So far as my own experience of teaching goes, a considerable proportion of pupils are naturally deficient in the power of learning languages. Such may find it barely possible to matriculate with an insufficient understanding of the English language, while in the higher stages disaster is inevitable. There are, moreover, other reasons why English cannot be mastered by a large majority of Indian boys. First of all, to accommodate this language in their minds, whose ingrained habit has been to think in an Eastern tongue, is as much a feat as fitting an English sword into the scabbard of a scimitar. Then again, very few boys have the means of getting anything like a proper grounding in English at the hands of a competent teacher - the sons of the poor certainly have not.

So, like the Hanuman of our ancient Epic, who, not knowing which herb might be wanted, had to carry away the whole mountain top, these boys, unable to use the language intelligently, have to carry in their heads the whole of the book by rote. Those who have extraordinary memories may thus manage to carry on to the end, but this cannot be expected of the poor fellows with only average brain power.

The point is - is the crime committed by this large number of boys, who, owing to congenital or accidental causes, have been unable to become proficient in the English language, so heinous that they must be sentenced to perpetual exile by the University? In England at one time thieves used to get hanged. But this penal code is even harsher, because the extreme penalty is imposed for not being able to cheat! For if it be cheating to take a book into the examination hall hidden in one's clothes, why not when the whole of its contents is smuggled in within the head?

However, I do not wish to lay any charge against those fortunate crammers who manage to get across. But those who are left behind, to whom the Hooghly Bridge is closed, may they not have some kind of ferry, if not a steam launch, at least a country boat? What a terrible waste of national material to cut off all higher educational facilities from the thousands of pupils who have no gift for acquiring a foreign tongue, but who possess the intellect and desire to learn.

I know what the counter-argument will be. Men will say: 'You want to give higher education in the vernaculars, but what about the textbooks?' I am aware that there are none. But unless higher education is given in the vernacular languages, how are textbooks to come into existence? We cannot very well expect a mint to go on working if the coins are refused circulation.