of learning in the East from the first anniversary of
the victory of Seringapatam. So splendidly did he plan, so wisely did
he organise, and with such lofty aims did he select the teachers of the
college, that long after his death he won from De Quincey the impartial
eulogy, that of his three services to his country and India this was
the "first, to pave the way for the propagation of Christianity--mighty
service, stretching to the clouds, and which in the hour of death must
have given him consolation."

When Wellesley arrived at Calcutta he had been shocked by the sensual
ignorance of the Company's servants. Sunday was universally given up
to horse-racing and gambling. Boys of sixteen were removed from the
English public schools where they had hardly mastered the rudiments of
education to become the magistrates, judges, revenue collectors, and
governors of millions of natives recently brought under British sway.
At a time when the passions most need regulation and the conscience
training, these lads found themselves in India with large incomes,
flattered by native subordinates, encouraged by their superiors to lead
lives of dissipation, and without the moral control even of the weakest
public opinion. The Eton boy and Oxford man was himself still young,
and he knew the world, but he saw that all this meant ruin to both the
civil and military services, and to the Company's system. The
directors addressed in a public letter, dated 25th May 1798, "an
objurgation on the character and conduct" of their servants. They
re-echoed the words of the new Governor-General in their condemnation
of a state of things, "highly discreditable to our Government, and
totally incompatible with the religion we profess." Such a service as
this, preceding the creation of the college, led Pitt's other friend,
Wilberforce, in the discussions on the charter of 1813, to ascribe to
Lord Wellesley, when summoning him to confirm and revise it, the system
of diffusing useful knowledge of all sorts as the true foe not only of
ignorance but of vice and of political and social decay.

Called upon to prevent the evils he had been the first to denounce
officially, Lord Wellesley wrote his magnificent state paper of 1800,
which he simply termed Notes on the necessity of a special collegiate
training of Civil Servants. The Company's factories had grown into the
Indian Empire of Great Britain. The tradesmen and clerks, whom the
Company still called