'I dislike,' he wrote to a friend, 'this filtration theory. In Bengal we are educating in English a few hundred Babus at great expense to the State. Many of them are well able to pay for themselves, and have no other object in learning than to qualify for Government employ. In the meanwhile we have done nothing towards extending knowledge to the million. The Babus will never do it. The more education you give them, the more they will keep to themselves, and make their increased knowledge a means of tyranny. If you wait till the bad English, which the 400 Babus learn in Calcutta, filters down into the 40,000,000 of Bengal, you will be ultimately a Silurian rock instead of a retired judge. Let the Babus {180} learn English by all means. But let us also try to do something towards teaching the three R's to "Rural Bengal."'[1] [Footnote 1: Referring to _The Annals of Rural Bengal_, which he had read on his voyage out to India.] The credit of giving effect to the measures then inaugurated belongs to Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. His educational reforms mark a new era in that Province. In 1870 the Department of Public Instruction was educating 163,854 children in Lower Bengal at a cost of 186,598 pounds to the State. In 1874, when Sir George Campbell laid down the Lieutenant-Governorship, he left 400,721 children being educated at a cost to Government of 228,151 pounds. He had, in the interval, covered Bengal with primary schools; pieced together and resuscitated the old indigenous mechanism of rural instruction, and, without actually curtailing high-class education, had created a _bona fide_ system of public instruction for the people of the country. While Lord Mayo believed that State education in India must rest on the broad basis of the indigenous and village school, he also recognised the necessity of making special allowance for certain classes. The Muhammadans--the old ruling class in India--had fallen behind in the race of life under the British system of Public Instruction. Lord Mayo discerned clearly how far this result was due to their own neglect, and how far to the unsuitability or uncongeniality of our educational methods. He urged {181} upon the Local Governments the necessity of making special provision to meet their wants; and the reforms on the lines which he indicated have done much to remove the difficulty.