Almost all
men in India feel that too much of their time before they left
England was devoted to the acquisition of the dead languages; and too
little to the study of the elements of science. The time lost can
never be regained--at least they think so, which is much the same
thing. Had they been well grounded in the elements of physics,
physiology, and chemistry before they left their native land, they
would have gladly devoted their leisure to the improvement of their
knowledge; but to go back to elements, where elements can be learnt
only from books, is, unhappily, what so few can bring themselves to,
that no man feels ashamed of acknowledging that he has never studied
them at all till he returns to England, or enters a society
differently constituted, and finds that he has lost the support of
the great majority that always surrounded him in India.[15] It will,
perhaps, be said that the members of the official aristocracy of all
countries have more or less of the same defects, for certain it is
that they everywhere attach paramount or undue importance to the
conventional learning of the grammar-school and the drawing-room, and
the ignorant and the indolent have everywhere the support of a great
majority.
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