Carey had not been six months at Serampore when he saw the importance of using the English language as a missionary weapon, and he proposed this to Andrew Fuller. The other pressing duties of a pioneer mission to the people of Bengal led him to postpone immediate action in this direction; we shall have occasion to trace the English influence of the press and the college hereafter. But meanwhile the vernacular schools, which soon numbered a hundred altogether, were most popular, and then as now proved most valuable feeders of the infant Church. Without them, wrote the three missionaries to the Society, "the whole plan must have been nipped in the bud, since, if the natives had not cheerfully sent their children, everything else would have been useless. But the earnestness with which they have sought these schools exceeds everything we had previously expected. We are still constantly importuned for more schools, although we have long gone beyond the extent of our funds." It was well that thus early, in schools, in books and tracts, and in providing the literary form and apparatus of the vernacular languages, Carey laid the foundation of the new national or imperial civilisation. When the time for English came, the foundations were at least above the ground. Laid deep and strong in the very nature of the people, the structure has thus far promised to be national rather than foreign, though raised by foreign hands, while marked by the truth and the purity of its Western architects.