name is the establishment of schools on the hills of India for the education of the children of Anglo-Indians belonging to those classes who cannot afford the expense of sending their children to England for their education, and also of Eurasians. At a very early period in his episcopate Cotton was struck by the insufficiency of the means of education for the children of these two classes, and by the danger of leaving large numbers of them uneducated while education was advancing among the natives with rapid strides. ‘He saw that if there could be one thing fatal to the spread of christianity it was the sight of a generation of unchristian, uncared-for Englishmen springing up in the midst of a heathen population. He felt that if there could be one thing subversive of our Indian empire it was the spectacle of a generation of natives, highly educated and trained in missionary and government schools, side by side with an increasing population of ignorant and degraded Europeans’ (Macmillan's Magazine, December 1866). The scheme by which Cotton sought to avert this danger was the immediate establishment on the hills of a school or schools imparting an education physically and intellectually vigorous, suited to the requirements of commercial life or the army or the Calcutta University, with religious teaching in conformity with the church of England, modified by a conscience clause for dissenters, and the eventual establishment in the great towns in the plains of cheaper schools on the plan of day schools for those whose means did not admit of their sending their children to boarding schools on the hills. Cotton's proposals were warmly supported by the governor-general, Lord Canning, who, discerning their importance from a political point of view, gave liberal aid to the scheme from the public funds. The schools, called by Bishop Cotton's name at Simla, Bangalore, and other places, are monuments of this part of his work.
While thus striving to meet the educational requirements of his poorer countrymen and of the Eurasians, and while devoting much attention to the duty of placing the government establishment of chaplains upon an efficient footing and supplementing it by additional clergymen, maintained partly by private contributions and partly by grants from the state, Cotton did not neglect missionary work. In the course of his extensive visitation tours, ranging from Peshawur, Cashmere, and Assam to Cape Comorin, and including Burma and Ceylon, he visited a considerable number of mission stations, examining the schools and conferring with the missionaries on matters connected with their duties. He also carried on a regular correspondence with the heads of the missionary societies in England. On the subject of native education he came to the conclusion, before he had been many years in India, that the object to be aimed at was the gradual abolition of the government colleges and a great enlargement of the grant-in-aid system, ‘instead of the impracticable scheme of introducing the Bible into all the existing government schools.’
Although thoroughly liberal in his views on ecclesiastical questions, Cotton could hardly be called a broad churchman in the ordinary acceptation of that term. He never forgot that he was a bishop of the church of England, and that it was his duty not ‘to lose sight of the chief peculiarities and distinctive merits of the English church in pursuit of an unpractical pretence at unity.’ Thus, while he was ready to meet the dissenters on common ground and to surrender all exclusive and offensive church privileges, such as the sole validity of marriages by episcopal clergy, and to meet them as far as possible in concessions such as the loan of the English churches to Scotch regiments in cases of absolute necessity, he was not prepared to make churches or burial-grounds common; and when it was proposed that the English church at Simla should be made available for a Scotch service for the few presbyterians at the station, he resisted the proposal as being uncalled for and certain to disgust the English clergy and the high-church laity, remarking that in all such matters every concession comes from the church side and none from the dissenters, and that if he became more and more of a high churchman he should be made one by captious and perverse agitations.
The great extent of the Calcutta diocese and the need of additional bishops for the Punjab and Burma—a need which has been since supplied—was much felt by Cotton. Another ecclesiastical reform which, though originating from Madras, received his cordial support, and was in fact developed at his instance on one point of considerable importance—the limitation of the period of service of the government chaplains to twenty-five years—was an increase of the pensions of the chaplains who were thus compelled and enabled to retire before being incapacitated for duty.
In the midst of his useful and varied labours Cotton lost his life by an accident. On 6 Oct. 1866, when returning in the dusk on board a steamer from which he had landed to consecrate a cemetery at Kushtiâ on the Ganges, his foot slipped on a platform of rough planks which he was crossing; he fell into the river and, being carried away
