For the government schools each province has a director of public
instruction, with inspectors of divisions and subdivisions. These directors
are "gentlemen of high qualification and well paid." It is a notable fact
that in one of the provinces the office of director is filled by a
Christian woman--a foreigner no doubt, though the report does not say.

At Dehra, at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, there is a high school for
girls organized on the plan of the Mount Holyoke Seminary. Here English is
spoken, and the pupils are carried through a course of training that may
justly be termed _high_. One of the pupils of this school has lately been
appointed by the government to go to England and qualify herself as a
physician, under a contract to return and serve the government by taking
charge of a hospital and college for training young women as midwives and
nurses.

Of course, in a country containing a population of over one hundred and
fifty-one millions, one thousand public schools for girls, supplemented as
these are by missionary schools of many denominations, are inadequate to
meet the needs of the people. There is an increasing demand in all the
provinces for schools and colleges; and the native young men especially are
eagerly seeking the educational advantages of the colleges and
universities, because they know that these are a sure road to preferment.
"The government takes care to give employment to those who wish it."

The difficulties in the way of female education in India are well expressed
in a late letter from one of the most distinguished native reformers, Baboo
Keshub Chunder Sen of Calcutta. "No words of mine," he says, "would convey
to you an adequate idea of the great obstacles which the social and
religious condition of the Hindoo community presents in the way of female
education and advancement. In a country where superstition and caste
prejudices prevail to an alarming extent, where widows are cruelly
persecuted and prevented from remarrying, where high-caste Hindoos are
allowed to marry as many wives as they like without undertaking the
responsibility of protecting them, and where little girls marry at a most
tender age and sacrifice all prospects of healthy physical and mental
development, it will take centuries before any solid and extensive reform
is achieved."

Until recently, scarcely one woman in ten thousand learned to read or
acquired any of the accomplishments common to women of Chr