Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/28

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channels of an alien culture. It was of course impossible for them to impart instruction in the vernaculars. The students were therfore called upon to do every intellectual work through a foreign medium. The crushing burden of receiving instruction through English has been pronounced by competent authorities to have "atrophied all originality, research, adventure, ceaseless effort, courage and like qualities." But the misfortunes of the student-world did not end here. The assimination of alien thought at an impressionable period of life is an unsupportable burden. The influence of Shelleys and Byrons, like that of all narcotics is at once exhilerating and depressing. It plants alien ideals into the hearts of the young, without affording that corrective which a close study of Hindu ideals can alone give. The deification of Western culture and civilisation inclines the students to apply the crude standards of Western materialism to the nobler civilisation of this country. It is thus that the cry of Social Reform has gone forth. The principles of democracy immortalised in the passionate writing and speeches of Burke, Bright and Gladstone create aspirations difficult of realisation in the cramping political atmosphere of the country. No wonder that many a graduate has found his physical strength and endurance severely taxed in his academical life. The spectacle of hundreds of bright young men annually leaving the university portals as physical wrecks is, in no small measure, due to the circumstances detailed above.

Bal must either have instinctively realized these dangers or must have found his fragile frame quite inadequate to the manifestations of the mighty spirit