When Wellesley arrived at Calcutta he had been shocked by the sensual ignorance of the Company's servants. Sunday was universally given up to horse-racing and gambling. Boys of sixteen were removed from the English public schools where they had hardly mastered the rudiments of education to become the magistrates, judges, revenue collectors, and governors of millions of natives recently brought under British sway. At a time when the passions most need regulation and the conscience training, these lads found themselves in India with large incomes, flattered by native subordinates, encouraged by their superiors to lead lives of dissipation, and without the moral control even of the weakest public opinion. The Eton boy and Oxford man was himself still young, and he knew the world, but he saw that all this meant ruin to both the civil and military services, and to the Company's system. The directors addressed in a public letter, dated 25th May 1798, "an objurgation on the character and conduct" of their servants. They re-echoed the words of the new Governor-General in their condemnation of a state of things, "highly discreditable to our Government, and totally incompatible with the religion we profess." Such a service as this, preceding the creation of the college, led Pitt's other friend, Wilberforce, in the discussions on the charter of 1813, to ascribe to Lord Wellesley, when summoning him to confirm and revise it, the system of diffusing useful knowledge of all sorts as the true foe not only of ignorance but of vice and of political and social decay.