Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/212

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1888.—Sir Raymond West.
197
a much greater extent than they have hitherto done, the number of readers up to this time, as I have been credibly informed, being only two. Now it must not be supposed for a moment that in commemorating as I do, and in the Government commemorating as it has done, the bounty of Sir Dinshaw, there is any, even the slightest, inclination to overlook the claims of high education in this Presidency. That bounty, aided as it will be by the transfer to the Government of the Ripon Memorial Fund, will be the commencement of a very great and beneficial work in this Presidency. I believe that the trustees of the Ripon Memorial Fund have found a way in which they may secure a perpetual memorial of Lord Ripon in whom we are all so deeply interested, and whose memory we would all wish to keep green. They have found the means by which it is expected that they will keep his memory distinctly alive and yet united with the larger and all-embracing institution, the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute. It is to be hoped that the arrangements by which these designs are to be carried out will very soon be accomplished, and then we shall have the University standing side by side with this great technical institution, each of them pursuing a beneficial course of its own. The University has thus, for the future, to share its duties in pushing on the intellectual training of the people of this Presidency with another institution. But let it never be said by way of reproach to the University that this new way has been found, and that the University was not awake to it when it was founded. The blessings conferred by the University. The University has in no wise fallen short of its high calling. It is only necessary to look back to the Act of Incorporation to see how difficult it was then even to form a Senate by which the Institution could be carried on, and it was necessary in those days of comparative backwardness for the University starting as a great experiment in this country to found itself on the recognised and established courses of study. The University based itself mainly on the old established lines of mathematics and literature, and surely it was right in doing so, because at that time all was uncertain, and surely no better discipline to the intellect could possibly be found than a study of mathematics, and the teaching it affords, in closeness of reasoning, in perspicuity, in the exercise of the discursive faculty, in the close examination of truth, and after that the embracing and holding fast of the truth, once realised, in a way in which no outcry of any multitude will ever shake. Then too literature surely, the literary line of study which this University has pursued, has its great and manifest advantages. The literature of the world represents the freedom and activity of the human spirit. It