535,155 pupils.  From these Secondary Schools in the year 1901, 21,750 candidates appeared at the Matriculation Examinations of the Universities professing to be able to write their answers in English, and of these nearly 8000 passed.  That figure is a measure of the process of leavening India with modern ideas through English education—­8000 fresh recruits a year.  That is the measure of the confusion introduced into the old social organism.  A small number, no doubt, compared with the ten million of unleavened youth born in the same year, and yet they are the pick of the middle classes and must become the leaders of the masses.  The masses in China, it is alleged, would not be anti-foreign were it not for the influence of their literati, and the thoughts of these Indian literati must also become the thoughts of the Indian masses.  It is the mind of these literati, mainly, which we are trying to gauge.  According to the census of 1901 their total number approached one million, being those who could read and write English.  Descending below the English-reading literati, I have noted about three hundred English words naturalised in two of the chief vernaculars of India, an indication, if not a measure, of the new influence among the masses.

[Sidenote:  Too sanguine prophecies of progress.]

Yet having tabulated figures, once more, ere we proceed, we enjoin upon ourselves and our readers a cautious estimate of the progress of ideas.  The European hood and gown of the Indian student may merely drape an unchanged being.  Writing in 1823 about the encouragement of education and the teaching of English and the translation of English books, the Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, declared too confidently that “the conversion of the natives must result from the diffusion of knowledge among them.”  Macaulay, similarly, writing from India in 1836 to his father, the well-known philanthropist, declares:  “It is my firm belief that if our plans of[English] education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.”  Omar Khayyam’s words suggest themselves as the other extreme of opinion regarding English education in India, inside of which the truth will be found: 

  “Myself when young did eagerly frequent
  Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
  About it and about, but evermore
  Came out by that same door wherein I went.”

The lines express the view of many Anglo-Indians.  We may reply that anywhere only a few individuals are positively liberalised by a liberal education.  We must patiently wait while their standpoint becomes the lore and tradition of the community.

[Sidenote:  Reformers are English-speaking; reactionaries are ignorant of English.]

The part played by English education in the introduction of new ideas is apparent whenever we enumerate the leading reformers of the nineteenth century.  One and all have received a modern English education, and several of them have made some name by addresses and publications in English.  Of Indian reformers, distinguished also as English scholars, may be named with all honour: