eloquence of the Commission, if I may borrow the language appropriately used to me by a very competent authority, was chiefly directed towards representing the important benefits that would be likely to accrue to Government and to education by the relaxation of Government’s control over education, the withdrawal of Government from the management of schools, and the adoption of a general go-as-you-please policy.  Amongst the definite results which we undoubtedly owe to the labours of that Commission was the acclimatization in India of Sir Robert Lowe’s system of “payment by results,” which was then already discredited in England.  Just at the time when the transfer of the teacher’s influence from European into native hands was being thus accelerated, the Public Service Commission, not a single member of which was an educational officer, produced a series of recommendations which had the effect of changing very much for the worse the position and prospects of Indians in the Educational Department.  Before the Commission sat, Indians and Europeans used to work side by side in the superior graded service of the Department, and until quite recently they had drawn the same pay.  The Commission abolished this equality and comradeship and put the Europeans and the Indians into separate pens.  The European pen was named the Indian Educational Service, and the native pen was named the Provincial Educational Service.  Into the Provincial Service were put Indians holding lower posts than any held by Europeans and with no prospect of ever rising to the maximum salaries hitherto within their reach.  To pretend that equality was maintained under the new scheme is idle, and the grievance thus created has caused a bitterness which is not allayed by the fact that the Commission created analogous grievances in other branches of the public service.  Nor was this all the mischief done.  It quickened the impulse already given by the Education Commission by formally recommending that the recruitment of Englishmen for the Education Department should be reduced to a minimum, and, especially, that even fewer inspectors of schools than the totally inadequate number then existing should be recruited from England.  It is interesting to note in view of subsequent developments that, whilst this recommendation was tacitly ignored by the Provincial Governments in some parts of India, as in Madras and in Bombay, it was accepted and applied in Bengal—­i.e., in the province where our educational system has displayed its gravest shortcomings.

From that time forward the dominant influence in secondary schools and colleges drifted steadily and rapidly out of the hands of Englishmen into those of Indians long before there was a sufficient supply of native teachers fitted either by tradition or by training to conduct an essentially Western system of education.  Not only did the number of native teachers increase steadily and enormously, but that of the European