of Indian teachers could hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian scholar.  Western education had been started in India at the top, whence it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process of gravitation.  Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed.  Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature, scarcely any effort was made—­perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a leaning towards the humanities—­to correct by the encouragement of scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely literary education.  Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of exact science.  Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the domain of education to the purely intellectual side.  Yet, religion having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.

Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service, gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart.  Greater facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of “hill stations” in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children.  But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society, it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic institutions, and especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier, which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of the two races.  Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained