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taken all the means within his reach of ohtaining an answer to this important question. An Hon. Proprietor had said, that he had heard of gambling being practised there. Much as he (Mr. Grant) had inquired into the state of the College, he was not, and could not be, prepared to meet charges turning upon particular facts, or affecting the conduct of individuals. Unless, however, it was meant to be asserted that the vice in question (and the same rule applied to any other excess or irregularity that could be imputed) prevailed, or was encouraged, or connived at, or not checked, at the College, it was manifestly inconclusive to refer to it at all. Now, on that head, had the practice of gambling been at all prevalent in the College, how was it to be explained that, according to the respectable testimony of the civilian which he had already quoted, since the institution of this seminary, gambling, which had formerly infected the civil service in India to a considerable extent, had almost disappeared? Particular instances of it might have existed at the College, as every body well knew such instances to have existed at other colleges; other vices and improprieties in like manner might exist; but lamentable and censurable as these undoubtedly were, did they necessarily furnish a ground of reproach against this seminary, as compared with other seminaries? Clearly not unless they prevailed in it to a greater extent, or in a more aggravated degree. He had conversed or corresponded with many persons competent to institute a comparison in this matter between the India College and other seminaries. Seven or eight of those persons had been students at that college, and also students at the university; others of them had passed through some of the public schools. On the whole, he was satisfied that the India College need not fear a comparison even with most of the public schools, and especially with those situated in towns; although, from the difference of the average age of the inmates, such a comparison would be manifestly unjust. But still more seIcurely might it challenge a comparison with the universities. At this institution, indeed, as at all institutions of the kind, differences might be observed in different years. Much depended on the accidental character of the students in any particular year, coming as they did from other seminaries, and at an age past childhood. Here, as at the university, there was sometimes a better, sometimes a worse set; and the testimonies of persons comparing the two, would necessarily vary according to the sets into which they had happened to fall at each place respectively. Making this allowance, however, he was struck with the remarkable concurrence of the opinions which he had received. Of those

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whom he had consulted, all, with a single exception, and even that gentleman, whom he knew to have fallen in with an indifferent set at Hertford, and with an excellent one in a particular college at Cambridge, gave a mixed opinion, awarded the palm of equality, and the great majority of that decided superiority to the India College. For his own part, and he was himself not totally without the advantage of personal observation, he was satisfied, that at Hertford the irregularities of all kinds were fewer beyond comparison. Let him not be supposed the advocate of such irregularities, even in their most venial forms; but the test of comparison was the only fair criterion to be applied in such a case; and by that test he was content that the College should be judged. it was contended that, whatever the comparative excellence of this establishment, yet, considering that the students were compelled to attend it, care should be taken entirely to exempt it from the dangers which, in a measure at least, were admitted to attach to it. The time of the young men should be filled up with useful or innocent employment; their hours of leisure should be so far superintended, as to preserve them from the influence of the temptations incident to their age. The risks, in short, incurred by them, in a moral point of view, should be diminished to the lowest possible amount. In answer, he could only observe, in exact coincidence with some excellent remarks already offered by his honourable and highly valued friend behind the bar (Mr. Money), that the precise reason why the young persons appointed writers were compelled to attend the college was, that it was essential, with a view to the particular service for which they were destined, that they should previously have acquired habits of self-government; and how such habits could be acquired, without incurring a certain degree of the moral risk referred to, he professed himself unable even to conceive. “If (said Mr. Grant) any person has discovered a solution of the problem hitherto so torturing to human ingenuity, in what manner we are to reconcile a perpetual system of inspection and superintendence, with that freedom of choice which is essential to moral agency—a course of watchful guardianship, by which error shall be rendered almost physically impossible, with the attainment of that selfcontroul and self-discipline, to which the possibility of erring is an essential prerequisite-an arrangement of time and employment by which all temptation shall be excluded, with that habit of resisting temptation which necessarily supposes a degree of exposure to it,-such a person cannot too soon announce his discovery, and claim the high station to which he will be entitled among the benefactors of

his species. The truth is, the thing is impossible: you cannot be sure that your pupil has acquired the power to stand, unless you in some measure accustom him to that latitude of self-disposal, which inevitably involves a liability to fall.

"What then, it is asked, will you compel a parent to subject his son to the admitted hazard, whatever be its amount, of an initiation into vice and dissipation? Shall he be necessitated to send forth his child at the critical period of the commencement of manhood, from the safe and sheltered privacy of the domestic mansion, into a scene where his opening virtues may receive a fatal blight from the influence of example?" My answer is, have you, the anxious inquiring parent, resolved to commit the virtues of that tender child, only two years later; to the perils of a residence in Writers' Buildings at Calcutta? Have you resolved to expose him, uncontrolled by parent or guardian, surrounded by a gay society of nearly his own age, and possessed of an almost unlimited command of money, to all the seductions of one of the most expensive, luxurious, and dissipated capitals in the world? Have you made up your parental mind to this measure? Then I have no difficulty in replying to your question. It would have been an anxious, a perplexing inquiry, to resolve generally well may a parent pause, who is called to consider whether he shall send forth the son in whom his hopes and his fondness are centered, into the neighbour hood of contagion, of vicious principles or practice but the question, as proposed by you, is not difficult at all. You have so narrowed the conditions of the problem, that I undertake it without hesitation. I say that, having determined to cast your son into the midst of the dangers with which his rising virtues must necessarily meet during his residence at any of the Indian Presidencies, and still more if at Calcutta, it is your bounden duty first to subject him to the probation of a public education. Having decided that he shall quit the security of his domestic residence for a premature introduction into life, and into the scenes I have alluded to, it is positively incumbent on you to prepare him for the navigation to which he is destined to graduate his transition to smooth the passage which not I, but you compel him to encounter, in exchanging the haven of parental counsel and guar dianship, for a wild and strong sea of temptation and opportunity. If you fear: to do this-if your feelings or your conscience (and I pronounce not that word, sarcastically) prevent you from exposing your offspring to the moral perils of a strictly-disciplined public seminary if you dread his proving too weak even for that modified trial, then how can you reconcile it to your feelings or your conAsiatic Journ.-No. 100.

science, to insist on his facing, without any previous fortification, the more formidable dangers of an India residence? If you dare not trust him even to the preparatory and probationary process necessary-if you shrink from subjecting him to the limited and guarded risks of the training

then on what principle, in the name of common consistency, can you venture to plunge him, untrained, unproved, unprepared, amidst the tremendous and accumulated hazards of the actual campaign?

Closely connected with the subject he had been considering, was one which had been a fertile theme of remark and complaint, namely, the number of the expulsions and rustications at the college. These had been thought, if not to be the effect, at least to afford a convincing proof of a system of discipline in some way faulty. Now, in the first place, as to the fact, he conceived it to be a mistake, to suppose that the number of these punishments at Hertford greatly exceeded the number of those at other seminaries. Mr. Malthus, writing in 1816, had produced well authenticated parallel instances; and be (Mr. Grant) could name a public school of great celebrity, in which, since the time in which the present question was before discussed in that Court, that is, since March 1817, not fewer than twelve expul sions had occurred, nine of which took place at one and the same time.

A Proprietor requested that the school might be named.

Mr. Grant said he should have no ob jection to name it to any gentleman out of Court, for he spoke from what he doubted not to be good information; but he must, for obvious reasons, request to be excused from mentioning names publicly. The truth however was, that any comparison that could be made of the number of expulsions at the India College with the number at other public seminaries, would involve a fallacy; and he would endeavour to explain why. The great peculiarity of the institution under consideration consisted in this, that every student admitted into its walls was possessed of an appointment, amounting to an excellent and most respectable provision for life; in effect, he hesitated not to say, that the value of these appointments constituted the real difficulty with which the establishment had to contend-the first and last of its difficulties.(Hear!) Partially, indeed, that difficulty had already, as to its practical operation, been smoothed away; he trusted it might be yet further reduced; whether it could be entirely obviated was a dif ferent question: but at present it undoubtedly existed, and in a sensible degree.

Now let gentlemen glance at the effect. of this peculiarity in the constitution of the college, with regard to the specific subject of expulsions. In other places of VOL. XVII. 3 H

education, generally speaking, one main object of the parent was that his son should go through the course with at least some degree of credit, and this object preponderated over the wish that he should barely get through. If, therefore, the parent received an intimation from the master, or other teachers of the place, that the youth had no chance of completing his period of studentship creditably, he was usually glad to act on such intimation, and to remove the pupil to some other seminary. Often, indeed, the parent did not wait for the hint, but spontaneously withdrew a boy whom he perceived to be incorrigible. Suppose him, however, to do otherwise, and the young idler to proceed from bad to worse, then the warning would by and bye be given more authoritatively: "Your son (he would be told in a whisper) has been guilty of considerable irregularities, nay, he has even incurred some jeopardy of expulsion: his longer stay cannot benefit himself, and must injure others." Thus admonished, any parent of ordinary pru. dence, far from resenting the advice, would feel himself indebted for it, and would transport the delinquent elsewhere without delay. But conceive even this communication to be slighted, and the student to commit at length an offence clearly worthy of expulsion, though not of a very flagrant or contumacious character; in this conjuncture once more the friendly option would be afforded-" Remove (it would be said) your son tacitly, while yet there is time, otherwise we must unavoidably proceed to expel him;" and to such an address no parent-not merely none of ordinary prudence, but none not wholly lost to common sense-would venture to be deaf for a single moment. At the India College the case was very different; there the value of the studentship was such as to render many, if not most parents, much more anxious that their sons should pass, than that they should pass creditably. They wished them to gain honours; but their chief solicitude was, that they should preserve their appointments. On the other hand, the young tyro was often as averse to the nomination as his father was attached to it. What was obviously the consequence? He soon became, as perhaps he would have been any where else, idle, irregular, disobedient. He was warned, but warned in vain. At length the professors intimated to the father or guardian that he had better be withdrawn; but the wishes and the convenience of the father were arrayed against the advice, and, in most instances, it was disregarded. Positive offences, and those perhaps of magnitude, ensued; again the parent was urged he was more than urged, he was reminded of the contingency, if not of the probability of expulsion. But on most parents,

possessed as they were with the idea that one son was off their list, even this sug gestion was thrown away; one or two terms more, they flattered themselves, and the danger would be over. Another stage of collegiate misconduct was next reached -the penalty of expulsion was actually incurred, and the parent was earnestly requested to withdraw his son privately, as the only alternative against his public dismissal. One would think that now, at least, the whisper would be omnipotent; and yet painful experience, to which it was not necessary more particularly to allude, proved that there were parents but too ready to reject even this office, and to dare all the risks of a public expulsion, in hopes of a reversal of the sentence by the visitor.

It was therefore plain that, instead of instituting a comparison between the number of expulsions at Haileybury and that of other seminaries, the only fair process would be, to add together the number of expulsions and of tacit removals at each place, and to compare together these two aggregates. To frame such a comparison with any accuracy would undoubtedly be most difficult. The removals which he had called tacit, were ex vi termini; not matters of notoriety, and therefore scarcely admitted of being numbered. But the general fact that such removals took place was notorious enough; and he believed that even a superficial inquiry into the subject would convince any person, that the occurrence was very frequent at schools or colleges of any size or strictness. Compare, in any year, the number of young men admitted at either of the universities, with the number of them who kept their terms and took degrees, and the disproportion was very striking. Taking a ca sual year at Cambridge, he found the number of the degrees scarcely to exceed one-half that of the admissions; and though doubtless some of those who did not graduate had died, and others had perhaps never purposed more than a temporary stay, and a third class had left the university from other causes, yet it could not be questioned, that a good number had either been withdrawn by their friends, or had voluntarily retired, in consequence of the plan not being found to answer. In illustration of the distinction between expulsions and private dismissals or removals, he would refer to this fact, which he believed would be verified by any inquirer, namely, that at the endowed schools the greatest number of expulsions took place from among the boys on the foundation; and so also at colleges, the greatest number took place among the scholars or students (who drew emoluments from the college), and not from among the ordinary pupils or under-graduates. Why was this? Was it because the collegers in

the one case, and scholars in the other, were more prone to commit offences than their associates who were not on the foundation? Certainly not; but because, having appointments of some value to lose, they were more apt to wait for a formal expulsion, instead of withdrawing on a private intimation given by the scholastic or collegiate authorities. Difficult as it was to treat the tacit dismissals of which he spoke as a matter of computa. tion, he (Mr. Grant) had attempted it. At a college of considerable size and eminence, it appeared, on a rough calculation, that in a course of time the undergraduates so dismissed amounted to at least one in seven of those admitted. The calculation was necessarily rough, and he did not mean to propound it as applicable generally, but he believed it would apply to many other colleges. Probably, however, the average of such dismissals throughout the universities would be found smaller, by reason of its embracing the less strict colleges; and indeed he believed that the occurrence was not so frequent at the small as at the large colleges, proportionably to the numbers they contained. He had heard of a computation for a whole university, making the ratio one in twenty, or twenty-five. At Haileybury, the expulsions, including the few tacit removals that had taken place, amounted to about one in fourteen or fifteen; which was scarcely half the proportion of those at the distinguished college he had alluded to, and which he firmly believed to be smaller than at almost any other collegiate institution of the same magnitude. Considering, indeed, the great strictness of the system maintained at the India College, on which he had already remarked, and the disadvantages under which that college had laboured-a subject fully treated by Mr. Malthus in his well-known pamphlet, and on which he (Mr. Grant) was not willing now to enter-it must be considered surprising (as his Oxford friend, alreadly cited, had observed) that the dismissals of all kinds, overt and tacit, from the institution had been so few.

A great deal had been said respecting the statutes of the college. He had not entertained the intention, nor could he perceive the relevancy of discussing those statutes; but the severe comments which had been made on them would justify his offering a few words. The statutes had been reprobated as arbitrary and despotical. Well and wisely had the Hon. Mover of the present question said this, as he had said many other things, that the proper theory of a seminary for education was, that it should be a despotism, but a despotism conducted in a parental spirit. The idea seemed to him unimpeachably correct: but, if you were to have a despotism, then clearly one of two courses must be fol

lowed: either a wide, general, and undefined power must be lodged in the hands of the conductors of the institution, to be exercised at their discretion, and without question or controul; or you must be at the pains of defining and apportioning out on paper the several privileges and authorities with which you meant to invest them, and which, in their compound, were to make up the despotic sway incident to their office. Should you, however, pursue this latter course-and it was the course actually adopted with regard to Haileybury-you must not be astonished if that which you wrote down -that is, if the statutes which you enacted-sounded harsh and arbitrary. Your regulations were ex hypothesi to constitute the functions of a despotic supremacy; and it was absolutely impossible that the features of a despotism, when thus analy tically viewed, and separated from those parental feelings and dispositions which were intended to correct and qualify them in practice, should not wear a very revolting appearance.

With regard to the statute of selection, as it was called, which had been so strongly censured, whatever construction might be put on the terms in which it was couched, he was happy to have received the assurances of the principal and the professors, that it was never employed by them for the purpose of obliging any youth involved in delinquency to betray his comrade; and that neither when a strong emergency had dictated a resort to this obnoxious statute, nor upon any other occasion, was it either the principle or the practice of the collegiate authorities, that one student should be exhorted or in any way encouraged to criminate another,(Hear!)

The Hon. D.Kinnaird-" Does the Hon. Proprietor mean to say, that the statute in question has not been employed on the unfortunate emergencies alluded to, to compel young men to make discoveries of the part which they had taken, on pain of expulsion?"

Mr. Grant said he was not aware that what he had said implied the conclusion involved in the question. There was a wide distinction between the act of exacting from a young man the confession of his own fault, and the act of extorting from him the discovery of the guilt of his companion. On the former point he was not able to speak; for the inquiries which he had made of the college authorities referred only to the latter. Speaking for himself, however, and on the spur of the question asked of him, he must observe, that while he should totally disapprove the practice of calling on a student to exonerate himself by impeaching others, he was not prepared to pronounce an equally decisive sentence against that of calling on

him, under certain circumstances at least, to exonerate others by impeaching himself. The former act would be dis honourable; but the practice of demand ing from youth the confession of their own faults was undoubtedly familiar in all parental government; and though he would not say that by a college authority the rule was to be enforced as freely as by a parent, and still less that it was to be a rule of ordinary application, he was, on the other hand not prepared to hold that it might not, in a strong case, be so far employed, as to propose to those who could not give an account of themselves the alternative of a dissolution of their connexion with the institution. As to the expressions which had been quoted from this reprobated law, that the visitation which it inflicted, could never reach any but those who from previous character, and from the actual circumstances of the case, laboured under violent suspicion of being concerned: this was, in fact, a milder power than was actually possessed by the heads of every collegiate institution, and which in a crisis of great exigency, when combinations against au thority were formed and contumaciously maintained, and where the secresy of the plot baffled discovery, he was assured, and believed, that the heads of no collegiate institution would hesitate to exercise. an occasion of this kind the late Bishop of Bristol, then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had not scrupled pub. licly to menace decimation, for the purpose of putting down a system of disturbance, and the menace was instantly successful. But there was no comparison at all between the power of decimation, and that of the selection afforded by the statute in question. In what he now said, he did not mean to give a definitive opinion on this statute, or indeed on any other of the statutes of the college, for he had not duly considered them; but merely to obviate the misconceptions that existed, by shewing that the powers conferred on the ruling authorities at Haileybury, however invidious, were such as they shared in common with persons holding a similar post in other establishments of the same class.

On

He had now afforded to the Court such a view as he was able of the institution at Haileybury; and he trusted it would be felt that a change of the present system ought not lightly, or without clear reason shewn, to be hazarded. It next, and lastly, belonged to his plan to consider the particular modification of the present system which was contemplated by the proposition before the Court; but he had made so large a demand on the patience and kindness of the Court, that he would be content with treating this part of the subject very briefly; indeed an extended discussion of it was the less necessary, as

some of the remarks he had already offered bore immediately on it, and as it had been ably handled by other gentlemen. The objections he felt to the plan recommended by the Hon. Mover of the proposition might shortly be stated thus: that while the system now in existence provided, as he had shewn, for all the three objects which guided parents in the choice of a public seminary; namely, for the attainment of useful knowledge, the formation of moral habits, and the acquisition of desirable friendships; the system proposed to be substituted failed in each of those three points; it would very imperfectly se cure the attainment of the requisite knowledge, it could not possibly secure the due formation of moral habits, and it did not even attempt to secure the cultivation of intimacies among those who were to be companions or contemporaries in the Indian civil service.

On the two latter topics it would be unnecessary to enlarge, as the proposition spoke for itself. The whole efficacy, whatever it might be, of the proposed plan, consisted in a literary and scientific examination; all moral probation, therefore, was out of the question, and the only intercourse to be enforced among the persons examined would be their being confronted in examination. With regard to the effect of the examination, as a test of proficiency in the science and literature necessary, he cordially concurred with those gentlemen who had declared their belief that the proposed test, under the circumstances that must attend the application of it, would prove wholly inoperative; that it would in no long period degenerate into a pure formality; and whenever that took place, all provision for the education of the civil servants must, under the new plan, be at an end. He would not trouble the Court with tracing the steps of the process by which this consummation was likely to be brought about; this had already been done very satisfactorily by an Hon. Proprietor (Mr. Poynder) who spoke early in the debate; and to the arguments by which that conclusion had been established he (Mr. Grant) had not as yet heard any attempt to give a direct answer. The only objections urged against them were founded on certain supposed precedents. It was said that the system of the Haileybury College itself supposed the efficacy of tests enforced by examination; that the competency of the assistant-surgeons appointed by the Company was ascertained solely by such tests; that the same remark applied to the naval officers of the Company's regular ships; and lastly, that the Military Seminary at Addiscombe afforded a practical proof of the sufficiency of the same crite rion. It might be worth while, very concisely, to estimate the weight due to these alleged precedents.

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