Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/105

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the people of india.
91

our colleges. The money spent on the Arabic and Sanskrit colleges was, therefore, not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth; it was bounty money paid to raise up champions of error, and to call into being an oriental interest which was bound by the condition of its existence to stand in the front of the battle against the progress of European literature.

In the five districts named in the margin, one of which contains the former Mohammedan capital of Bengal, Murshedabad, Bheerbhoom, Burdwan, South Behar, Tirhoot. Mr. Adam found only 158 students of Arabic learning. In the single government college of Calcutta there are 114 students. Although supported and patronised by the British government, this college differs in no respect from the Mohammedan colleges at Constantinople and Bokhara. It is as completely a seminary of genuine unmitigated Mohammedanism as the Jesuits’ college at Rome is a seminary of Roman Catholicism. It is considered by the Moslems as the head quarters of their religion in Bengal, and it has made Calcutta the radiating centre, not of civilization, as it ought only to be, but, to a lamentable extent, of bigotry and error.

The Sanskrit college was a still more desperate