Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/324

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1864.—Mr. E. Thompson.
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teachers; all honour to you for your choice of a profession. I hope that you will be encouraged to persevere in the course on which you have entered, and that you will not merely look upon tuition as a means of livelihood for a time, to be given up when something more attractive offers itself, but as a profession to last your lifetime. It is indeed an arduous one, full of anxieties, difficulties, discouragements; it may indeed, (if you persevere, it must) afford you a competence, but you cannot expect much more, and wealth is out of the question; but it has its bright side too; it is pleasant to watch the progress of pupils in the school and in the world, and it will be no small consolation in after years to look back upon a well-spent useful life, and to feel that hundreds are indebted to you for some of the purest and highest of earthly pleasures.

But those among you who are not about to become teachers, may still do much to promote education. Promote Education. In the first place you may exert your personal influence with your families, and point out to all connected with you the great advantages to be derived from a liberal education, and in the course of time when sons and daughters are born to you, it will be your duty to see that they do not, to say the least, fall short of the acquirements of their parents. Again, it may well happen, now that so many roads to advancement are open to you, that some of you at least may become wealthy men; and a portion of that wealth can hardly be better employed than in providing means of instruction for others. You may found prizes, scholarships, professorships, and the time may come when even a College may owe its origin to the enlightened liberality of some educated Hindu. It was remarked the other day by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, himself one of the brightest living ornaments of his own University, that to found a College was a means of transmitting to distant posterity the memory of a name which otherwise would soon have passed away. He instanced a College at Cambridge, founded by a Physician in

the reign of Queen Elizabeth, whose name however well known in his own times would undoubtedly long since have been forgotten, had it not been that year after year students, issuing forth from the College which owes its existence to his bounty, and distinguishing themselves in the University and in the world, have made familiar to the ears even of the present generation the name of a physician three centuries in his grave. This laudable ambition has already induced some natives of Bombay to come forward with princely munificence, and found Colleges