not enough academies and high schools of suitable grade to prepare their students.

In discussing the effect of the local examinations in England and the need of improvement in this country, a writer in the Nation says:

"Looking at these great systems, and at the fine training which English women now receive, one cannot but long that our American girls, of the leisure class, should awaken to their own intellectual needs. Nobody would venture to maintain that our fashionable girls' schools (with one or two honorable exceptions), give a solid education; and yet, year after year, many hundreds of dollars are spent on the education of each pupil, and she passes many hours of every day in the confinement of the school-room, only to leave it at eighteen, if naturally clever, with a despairing disgust for the culture she has vainly groped after; or, if a dunce, with confirmed self-complacency in her ignorance. The effect of such culture is not only intellectual-it is moral, blight, for its atmosphere is that of sham.'

Many other authorities might be quoted to show the prevalent feeling that something is needed to add greater efficiency to our secondary schools. This grade of education has been, in this State, largely committed to the direction of the Board of Regents. It cannot be denied that, under their fostering care, good work has been done, and great progress made. It is equally certain that the time has come when another step in advance should be taken. The business depression of the last four years, which has closed the shops and factories, has filled up the public schools. Thousands appreciate now, as they could not five years ago, the superiority of intellectual possessions to material wealth. They resolve that their children shall receive an outfit for life, which commercial revulsions will not sweep away, and which the lapse of time will but render more productive. It is the happy privilege of this venerable and honorable board, and the teachers in the schools, subject to their control, to supply a great want of the schools of this State. The people have again expressed, through their representatives in the Legislature, their devotion to the normal and every other grade of public instruction. No expenditures are more cheerfully made or yield a richer or surer return than those in behalf of popular education; and no deliberations or plans for supervision evince more patriotism and sagacity than those which are designed to add strength, symmetry, and completeness to the system.

AMERICAN EDUCATORS IN INDIA.

By Rev. ROYAL G. WILDER, A. M., of Kolapoor, India.

India is the land of the Vedas-of an ancient civilization and religions culture, which gave to our brethren of the Aryan race a high name and position when as yet our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were but painted savages, clad in the skins of wild beasts, and practicing the cruel rites of their Druidic faith.

But a few centuries have reversed this order. The Anglo-Saxon branch of this race has risen. The Hindu branch has gone 'down. Why this mighty reversion?

We stop not to discuss this problem. We leave it for scientists and philosophers to solve at their leisure-only hoping they will solve it, and tell us the forces involved.

We recognize our own preeminence, and our Christian faith and civili zation as prominent elements in it.

We as readily recognize that our brother Aryans in India have declined—even from the nobler elements of their own primal faith. We see that hey have relapsed from physiolatry to idolatry-gradually enlarging their pantheon to the number of 330,000,000 of gods, many of them such as to require rites the most odious and revolting, even to the sacrifice of human victims. We see that in this process the Hindus degenerated physically, mentally and morally, till they became incapacitated for self-government, and hence an easy prey to foreign conquest and oppression-first under Moslem tyrants, and laterly under the juster rule of Great Britain.

The story of th Hindus for the last 1000 years, their deep ignorance and superstition, their cruel sufferings under successive conquerorssufferings from the frown of God and ths selfish greed, tyranny and lust of man-is one to stir the profoundest sympathy of human hearts. The supplanting of Moslem power in India by that of Great Britain marked an era of brighter hope; and yet the gloomy fact darkens the entire history of the British conquest of India, that for more than 200 years of the growing power of the British East India Company, that company, then representing the fairest land of all christendom, did not a thing designedly to lessen the superstitions, lighten the ignorance, or improve the mental or moral condition of its subject millions.

It was left for an obscure youth from America to become God's instrument for introducing into the fossilized layers of Hin in society a new and vitalizing force. That youth was Gordon Hall. That force was Christian Education-a force which has already broken the strong bonds of ignorance and superstition, though cemented by time and caste, has revealed and burnished the shining qualities of many an Aryan mind, disclosing rare gems of intellect and unthought-of elements of power, raising thousands of Hindus to an equality with the best scholars of christendom in mental, moral and Christian elements of character, and thus giving abundant promise of a future for the Aryans of India to be surpassed by that of no other people on the globe.

In claiming for Gordon Hall the honor of being foremost in introducing Christian education into British India, I would detract nothing from other workers in this same cause. All honor to Carey and Marshman, already

prosecuting their work in the little Danish settlement of Sarampore, when our American missionaries first reached India-as also to Swartz Zieganbalg, and their associates, previously engaged in evangelistic labors in the South of India. But Hall was the first Christian Educator to gain a foothold in British Indian territory, and this with mu h sacrifice and imminent peril to his own life. Hall's banishment by the Governor-General on his first landing at Calcutta, his reappearance at Bombay, the stringent order of Sir Evan Napean, the Bombay Governor, requiring him to go on board the only ship in the harbor and sail at once for England; Hall's hasty flight in a native boat down the coast hoping to gain the territory of a native prince beyond British rule, helped in this escape by ieut. Wade and one noble Christain lady, who took him in her own carriage to the unfrequented point where he found the native boat awaiting him -the rapid pursuit, arrest and re-conveyance to Bombay by British officials at the Governor's order, though providentially too late for the ship which had meantime sailed; his consequent detention in Bombay waiting another ship till he penned that thrilling appeal whose earnest words, hot from a soul on fire with love to Christ and the perishing heathens, burned into the soul of Sir Evan Napean and other Christians in India and England, moving eventually the British Parliament and resulting under God in breaking down the wicked policy of the East India Company, and opening up all India to the gospel and Christian education— these are incidents constituting a page of history and of heroism far too little known even by American Christians to whom, through Gordon Hall, accrues the honor of this grand achievement.

NUMBER OF AMERICAN EDUCATORS IN INDIA.

The list of American educators in India, for longer or shorter periods, during the last 64 years, embraces some 250 ordained missionaries, and an equal number of assistant missionaries, including married and unmarried women, most of whom have borne a most worthy part in this work. The names of such men as Winslow and Scudder, of Madras; Spaulding, Poor and Meigs, of Ceylon; Graves, Allen and Hume, of Bombay; Campbell, Warren, and scores of others in Northern, Western and Southern India, with such women as Mrs. Spaulding, Harriet Winslow, and Ann Hasseltine Judson, are enough to assure us that they represent a noble band of most earnest and unselfish workers. Many of them had but brief periods of service, but others had 30, 40, and even 50 years of most faithful and fruitful toil.

But, it is not so much my purpose to magnify the workers in this enterprise as to speak of the work they accomplished; and, having already glanced at the origin of this work, let me now speak, in briefest terms, of the motive involved, the extent of this education, its influence on the policy of other missionaries, its influence on the British Government, and its results, both achieved and prospective to the people of India.

MOTIVES.

Hall landed in Bombay February 11, 1813. Held in durance by the government, after his attempted flight into native jurisdiction, and wholly unskilled in the language of the people, he must have labored under special disabilities. But his burning desire for the temporal and spiritual good of the people was like a fire shut up in his bones-a mighty passion brooking no restraint. He was not a mere teacher,

working to fulfil a contract, and secure a stipulated salary. None such have ever been found among all the American educators of India. Their ruling motive has ever been the spiritual good of the Hindus, That they resorted so largely to schools, and expended so much of their time and energies on the young, is only evidence of the practical elements of their own minds, and the intentness of their purpose. That these elements appeared so distinctively in case of this first pioneer in the work, is proof of a favoring providence in his admirable fitness for the enterprise. Rapidly becoming master of the native language, and finding his best endeavors, by public. preaching, unsatisfactory, not because of any lack of power in the gospel, but because it proved impossible to infuse Christian truth into minds brim full of the grossest errors and superstitions, which had been born with them, and had grown with their growth, till they had become inseparable parts of their most sacred belief, thought, feeling, and even of life itself; as impossible as it is to pour water into a vessel filled with crooked nails embedded in cement, utterly impervious to moisture, he sought to mollify and disintegrate ignorance, error, and superstition, by process of educating youthful minds; hence, he originated schools in the very first year of his efforts, and we soon find him writing to his old teacher, the Rev. Dr. Porter, of Andover, as follows, viz.: "Native schools and the school-book society are among our most promising objects. All our exertions in the way of schools and school-books are attended with much encouragement." And again: "The business of schooling among the natives is every day becoming more interesting, promising, and popular." Just here, in this experience of Gordon Hall, we find the true motive of all that has been done by missionaries to educate the Hindus, to the present time.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF EDUCATIONAL WORK.

A most careful collation of all the annual reports and records of the first 40 years of the Bombay Mission of the A. B. C. F. M., the first and oldest mission foriegn mission ever established from this land, reveals the following result, viz: A constant average of 20 schools, with an average attendance of over 1,000 pupils.

The statistics of the Ahmed nuggur Mission, of the same Board, are less perfect, but its schools and pupils have been largely in excess of those of the Bombay mission. The writer of this paper recalls continuous years of labor in that Mission, when the number of pupils in the seminary and schools under his personal teaching or supervision, exceeded 1800. When sent thence, in 1852, to establish a new mission in unbroken Hinduism, in the Independent Native Kingdom of Kolapoor, he found schools his only possible means of gaining a connection with the people; and once having succeeded in establishing schools, while prosecuting his work alone for a score of years, he maintained an average of some 500 pupils till the people themselves were roused to effort, and king and chiefs joined in the work.

FEMALE EDUCATION.

The origin and history of female education, by our educators in India, have proved it to be a work of greater difficulty and bolder aggression on Hindu bigotry and superstition than that for the other sex. There is a volume of patient and persevering toil here, almost wholly unknown to the Christian public. Our Zenana workers in India are now known and

honored. But who knows of the many earnest, loving, patient, persevering Christian women, who prayed and toiled in this same work two-score years before Zenana work found a name, and without whose antecedent toil it could never have come to exist in its present form? All the long years from 1820 to 1860, there were American women in India, toiling most patiently and zealously to educate and elevate the degraded women of that land-single women, like Miss Cynthia Farrar-wives and widows of missionaries, like Mrs. Mary Graves, both of whom lived and died and made their graves among the Hindu women, for whom they prayed and labored. There have been many such women among our American educators in India, whose untiring zeal, quenchless Christian love, and heroic self-sacrifice, with God's help, made Hindu female education a possibility, and whose memory may well come over Christian hearts as an inspiration, bringing with it something of the fragrance of the precious ointment poured on the feet of Jesus.

A partial examination of the educational history and statistics of the Missions of A. B. C. F. M., at Madras, Madura, and on the Island of Ceylon; of the Mission of our Dutch Reformed brethren, having its center at Arcot; of our American Baptist and Lutheran Brethren among the Telugus, and elsewhere; and of the missions of the American Presbyterian Church along the Gangetic Valley, and far up in Northern India, leads me to estimate the Hindu children and youth sharing the advantages of our American Missionary Schools, as not less than 20,000, continuously for a series of some 50 years. And, estimating that some 5,000 of these youths have left the schools, and gone out into Hindu society each year, your American educators have thus sent out 250,000 Hindu youth, educated fairly in the fundamental and practical branches of knowledge-many of them in the higher branches-all of them instructed in. the fundamental elements of Christian truth; and this army of educated men now holding the places of honor and influence in most of the towns and villages of the whole land. But I was to speak of the

INFLUENCE OF THIS AMERICAN EDUCATION ON THE POLICY OF OTHER MISSIONS.

We need not arrogate any special wisdom to our American missionaries for their resorting so largely to schools in their early evangelistic efforts for the enlightenment of the Hindus. We need not infer that European missionaries, in the progress of experience, would not have adopted the same agencies. In seeking to evangelize India, the use of schools was only the result of practical common sense. That the English missionaries at Serampore, and Swarz and his coadjutors in the south of India, engrossed as they were at first in Bible translation and other special schemes, did not, at the outset, resort to schools so largely as the American missionaries did, is no proof that experience would not have brought them to perceive the true value of this arm of the service. Be this as it may, in British India, Hall and his associates were the pioneers, begining their work in Bombay 16 years in advance of any other Protestant missionaries; hence, too, they were pioneers in the work of education. When European missionaries subsequently came in, they at once had the full benefit of our American educators' experience, and certain it is they resorted to schools in equal or larger measure. The Scotch missionaries, on coming to India, established schools at once, both on the continent, and in Bombay, aud soon outstripped the American missionaries, both in the number of their schools and the high character of the