ason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of
them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the
Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that
British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however
beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject
race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It
heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without
which the promise would have been empty.

The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted
Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to
provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous
educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the
renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a
certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But
long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy
over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more
suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of
English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the
opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff,
a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone
win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7,
1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn
which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary
self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of
English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the
immediate objects in view--and incidentally as a measure of economy--was
undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the
more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the
administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was
quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians
to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means
blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating.
Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government
and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our
efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public
mind of India may expand under our syst