partment of Public
Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by
Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of
Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government
colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the
bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational institutions. The
claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital
importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater
proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of
the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a
really national system of education worthy of the faith which the
British generation of that day had in the establishment of an
intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The
initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of
that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn
up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his
administration during his eight years' tenure of office--an
administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the
noblest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual
and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone
and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in
trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were
carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to
the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left
India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of
intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports
from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each
successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His
immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely
prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of
office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a
small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing
larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with
ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to
face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of
co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad
and liberal policy of "peace,