of the College established by the Company at Hertford; and this we shall not attempt in the way of a continued historical deduction, but rather in that of synopsis; briefly describing, in the first place, the nature of the institution, and then the results it has actually been found to produce, not without some notice of the recent controversy respecting it.

The India College was established in the year 1805, and placed under the management of a Principal and a certain number of professors. For some time it subsisted only at the pleasure of the Company; but was at length formally recognized by the legislature, in the act of the 53d Geo. III. c. 156, which provides that no person shall be sent as a writer to any of the presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, who has not passed four terms (two years) at the College; nor even then, unless he produces a certificate of his good conduct under the hands of the collegiate authorities. By the statutes of the College, (which the act makes binding, if passed by the Directors with the approbation of the Board of Controul,) it is further provided that no person shall be nominated to the College as a student until he has completed his sixteenth year; that every candidate for admission shall produce a testimonial from his schoolmaster, and shall pass an examination before the Principal and Professors, in Greek, Latin, and arithmetic;—that, on leaving the college, the student shall be classed by the collegeauthorities in the order of their merit as to industry, proficiency, and general good behaviour, and shall rank in the service accordingly; and that no student shall be allowed to proceed to India, unless he is able to pass a certain prescribed test in Oriental literature. The sum to be annually paid by each student is one hundred guineas.

The lectures of the different professors embrace, in their substance, the subjects of classical literature, of the Oriental lan guages, of the elements of mathematics and natural philosophy, of the evidences and principles of religion, of the laws of England, of general history, and of political economy. At the end of every term, the students undergo a very strict examination. The trial lasts above a fortnight; when separate lists or classifications of them are made, arranging them according to their proficiency in the several departments in which they have been examined; and medals, prizes of books, and honorary distinctions, are awarded to those who are at the head of any one department, or as high as second, third, fourth, or fifth, in two, three, four, or five depart

ments.

Such appears to be the general nature of this establishment; and, without excluding the possibility of smaller objections to it, (which, indeed, we reserve to ourselves the right of making,) we should

14

certainly

certainly say that, in point of system, it seems very well calculated for the accomplishment of the great purposes, with a view to which it was founded. In order, however, to ascertain how far it was likely to fulfil those purposes in point of fact, it will be well to notice some less observable peculiarities in its genius and constitution, or, at least, in the incidents by which it was originally attended, and in the actual position which it was designed to occupy.

There can be no doubt that the circumstances under which the India College began its career, were, to a certain extent, very favourable. Public seminaries have sometimes been endowed by the piety and charity of private individuals. In such cases they usually prosper for a season; but, on the death of the founder, it too often happens that the trust devolves on less able or less zealous managers, and the glory of the institution may be said to pass away. The India College, on the contrary, was to live under the fostering influence of the same body which had called it into being; and, as there was no reason to believe that the considerations which had suggested the propriety of such an institution, would either become less urgent in themselves, or be less justly appreciated by its patrons, it might apparently reckon on a firm, unfailing, and enlightened support. Further, most of our public seminaries were founded in the early, or at least in the middle periods of English history; and may, therefore, be supposed not always exempt from the languor and the decay incident to establishments of long standing. They were also founded in times of comparative ignorance and judice, if not of semi-barbarism: hence their systems of education are occasionally faulty; and, even when these are corrected, they cannot entirely shake off the clogs of ancient forms, but have to run the race of improvement in shackles. The India College was differently circumstanced. It arose in a period of the greatest intellectual refinement and illumination which the world has yet witnessed; and, in forming its system, might be expected to avail itself of all the resources within its reach. It was new; and, in reducing its system into practice, might be expected to proceed with all that freshness and vigour which novelty never fails to inspire.

pre

These, certainly, were favourable circumstances; but they were accompanied by others of a less auspicious kind; and which, though they did not develope themselves immediately, were yet involved (if we may so express it) in the very origin of the institution. Novelty, indeed, has always its peculiar difficulties, as well as its peculiar energies; but the India College was not merely new as an individual; it was, in some respects, new even as a species. A seminary which, instead of revolving in a path of its own, acts as a sort of satellite to a great empire,-a seminary inseparably

connected

connected with a government, and that a government of a very. singular structure,-a seminary placed under the immediate controul of those whose friends or relatives constitute its only students, -a seminary where the students are all on their probation for the attainment of permanent appointments of great value, is a seminary of a most unusual character. Such is the more general and obvious aspect of the case; but some of the particular considerations which this broader view includes, or which are immediately connected with it, seem to deserve a closer inspection.

Before the establishment of the college, the appointment of a writer to India, appears to have been a very simple and summary operation. The appointment might be conferred on a boy of fifteen; and the following, as we find, was the process of inauguration. Being recommended to the Court of Directors by some individual member of that body, the young candidate presented a petition to the Honourable Court, stating that he had been educated in reading, writing, and accounts,-expressing a humble hope, therefore, that he was qualified to serve their honours in the capacity to which he aspired,—and praying to be appointed accordingly. No inquiry was made of the petitioner in such cases, excepting whether the petition he had presented were in his own hand-writing; and, it being thus taken on his word that he could write, and under his hand that he could cipher, he was without any further examination pronounced worthy of a place among the administrators of the Indian empire, and was instantly embarked for the scene of his intended service; where, in later times at least, he no sooner arrived, than he entered on the receipt of £400 a year. It is not meant to be denied that many of the persons so sent might have received a good education: of some, the education had undoubtedly been excellent; but, whatever it was, it was not made the subject of official cognizance. This very goodly and comfortable order of things is now changed. The young writer must have attained the age of sixteen before he is permitted to enter the college; and he will not be permitted to enter at all, unless he can sustain a previous examination. He must have passed two years. .in a close course of study at the college before he is allowed to embark for India; and he will not be allowed to embark at all, unless he entitles himself to it by good conduct, and by a certain measure of literary proficiency. Material failure in these respects, or any great misdemeanour, exposes him to the total loss of his appoint

ment.

Add to all this, he must, during his residence at the college, pay the annual sum of one hundred guineas. Thus, by raising the standard-age of setting out for India, this system has diminished the range, and, therefore, lowered the value of Indian patronage; by interposing two years, during which the appointment pays nothing

and

and costs £210, it operates doubly as a tax on that patronage; by exacting qualifications which all young men do not find it convenient to attain, it renders the efficiency of that patronage precarious; and, by enjoining a regularity of deportment, which all young men do not think it necessary to observe, it subjects that patronage to be completely defeated after all.

The college was established by the general concurrence of the Directors and Proprietors; that is, precisely of the persons most interested in the disposal of the patronage in question. A sentiment of public spirit, therefore, overpowered, in this instance, the feelings of selfishness, which (from what has been seen) would have resisted the proposed institution. This was doubtless the cause of the acquiescence, at least in part; and, in part, it may fairly be conjectured that the privations and inconveniences which the plan was about to impose on individuals, were not then distinctly foreseen. No sooner, however, did the machine move, than its weight began to be felt. The acquisition of a writership was now found to be attended with the payment of heavy tolls. It is not in human nature to love restraint, expense, uncertainty, or mortification of any kind, or to esteem these otherwise than as things to be shunned. Yet, for a while, the grievance, not being experienced in its worst forms, appears to have been thought light; but when the course of time brought into operation the more onerous penalties unavoidably attached to the system,-when it became apparent that appointments, esteemed a provision for life, might be forfeited by the misconduct of the parties appointed,-when it was seen that parents, after having long flattered themselves that their children were, in the worldly phrase, off their hands,' might find it necessary to receive back the inconvenient burden, lighter only by the loss of a character; then it was that a strong feeling of interest arose against the institution which was conceived to have produced these ills. Nor could the opposition fail to spread; for it was here as in political society at large; the active animosity which the severer effects of the system had excited in a few, attracted forth and made prominent the negative discontents which its more ordinary pressure had generated in a greater number. The wish now began to be entertained in some quarters that the college had never existed; that the worthy Directors had been quiet with their theoretical improvements; that things had remained as they were; and, from this wish, there was but one step to the thought that these troublesome innovations ought to be forthwith abolished, and that the good old times of writing and ciphering could not too soon be restored.

This opinion, though by no means general among the Proprietors, as the event has proved, and though held, we doubt not, in many cases, very sincerely and with the most honest intention, was

suf

sufficiently common and sufficiently wrong, to produce considerable injury. The prejudice of the parents communicated itself to the children. A student, to whom the college had perpetually been represented as an abuse and a grievance, or even one who had heard it habitually spoken of in the language of coldness and indifference, was little likely to repair to it with the kind and docile dispositions indispensable to a due use of the advantages it afforded. On the contrary, he would naturally regard it with dislike and disgust; and these feelings would quickly discover themselves in an inattention to his studies, and a growing impatience of controul. It seems the opinion of Mr. Malthus, that the minds of not a few of the young men were tainted with this sort of derivative disaffection; but other causes conspired to produce the same effect. The policy of parents had, in some instances, destine d youths for India, who, disliking that destination themselves, we e not sorry to find even an irregular escape from the threatened evil boy means of a failure at the college. A greater number indulged the belief that the support of their patrons in the Direction would prc>tect them against the forfeiture of their appointments, whatever offences they might commit at the college, and whatever penaltie s might in consequence be imposed on them by the Principal and 1 Professors: a persuasion inevitably tending to promote a strong spirit of idleness and disobedience.

It must not, however, be imagined that habits of insubordina tion, or feelings of disrespect for authority, were familiar to the great body of the students. On the contrary, and notwithstanding the very injurious misrepresentations which have been circulated or this subject, there is conclusive evidence that their general conduct : has been studious, orderly, and decorous, in no common degree.. But, taking them in the mass, there was just that quantity of pre disposition to the evil described, which, in certain positions of ex citement, and under the wickedly-timed instigation of two or three › mischievous persons, might be roused to unwarrantable excesses. Nothing can be more admirable than what Adam Smith, in one o f his momentary but striking deviations from the habitual coldness of his statistical philosophy, commends as the generosity of the greater part of youth.' But the nature of that generous age is a s impressible as it is noble. No man surely can have been conversant with juvenile communities, who has not observed that they are: a sort of Athenian populace, susceptible of fleeting impressions, and 1 responsive to the influences of incident and situation, in a degree perfectly surprizing.

From the persons for whose benefit this seminary was more immediately instituted, it is natural to turn our eyes on those under whose protection it was placed; and especially on its acknowledged

and,