Their influence, however, has been rapidly undermined by a new and essentially revolutionary school, who combine with a spirit of revolt against all Western authority a reversion to some of the most reactionary conceptions of authority that the East has ever produced, and, unfortunately, it is this new school which has now got hold of the younger educated classes.
Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to account with no mean measure of success.

I must reserve the thorny question of education for separate treatment.

All I need say for the present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from the realities of Indian life, the results might have been very different.

As it is, in the form given to it in our Indian schools and colleges, which have been allowed to drift more and more into native hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity.

The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous.