The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education instituted by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them. Diffusion had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often ill-equipped for their task. The training of Indian teachers could hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed. Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature, scarcely any effort was made--perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a leaning towards the humanities--to correct by the encouragement of scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.