At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to stop with the common school.  But I made no converts.  Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above following their fathers’ mechanical trades, yet could find no market for their book-knowledge.  The same rail that brought me the letter from the Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its contents treated of this matter of over-education.  In the preface occurs this paragraph from the Calcutta Review.  For “Government office” read “drygoods clerkship” and it will fit more than one region of America: 

“The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers.  On the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in life, and less willing to work with their hands.  The form which discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially in a Government office.  The village schoolboy goes back to the plow with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father’s workshop.  Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school.”

The little book which I am quoting from is called “Indo-Anglian Literature,” and is well stocked with “baboo” English—­clerkly English, hooky English, acquired in the schools.  Some of it is very funny, —­almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and free.  If I were going to quote good English—­but I am not.  India is well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best of us.  I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at the use of our tongue.  There are many letters in the book; poverty imploring help—­bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant’s unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties of kinship.  Among us I think there is nothing approaching it.  Strange as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule, that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it.  In the following letter “father” is not to be read literally.  In Ceylon a little native beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was mistaken.  I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.