fortunate for India that a man with the tastes, and the training,
of Macaulay came to her shores as one vested with authority, and that
he came at the moment when he did; for that moment was the very
turning-point of her intellectual progress. All educational action had
been at a stand for some time back, on account of an irreconcilable
difference of opinion in the Committee of Public Instruction; which was
divided, five against five, on either side of a controversy,--vital,
inevitable, admitting of neither postponement nor compromise, and
conducted by both parties with a pertinacity and a warmth that was
nothing but honourable to those concerned. Half of the members were
for maintaining and extending the old scheme of encouraging Oriental
learning by stipends paid to students in Sanscrit, Persian, and Arabic;
and by liberal grants for the publication of works in those languages.
The other half were in favour of teaching the elements of knowledge
in the vernacular tongues, and the higher branches in English. On his
arrival, Macaulay was appointed President of the Committee; but he
declined to take any active part in its proceedings until the Government
had finally pronounced on the question at issue. Later in January 1835
the advocates of the two systems, than whom ten abler men could not be
found in the service, laid their opinions before the Supreme Council;
and, on the and of February, Macaulay, as a member of that Council,
produced a minute in which he adopted and defended the views of the
English section in the Committee.

"How stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present
be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some
foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary
to recapitulate. It stands preeminent even among the languages of the
West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest
which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of
eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely
as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as
vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled;
with just and lively representations of human life and human nature;
with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government,
jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting
every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to
inc