We know that a certain number have emerged into public distinction, but there is nothing to show, except in the most, general way, how many have turned their education to humbler but still profitable account, or how many have turned it to no account at all.
Paradoxical as it may sound, it is the eagerness of young India to respond to our educational call that has led to the breakdown of the system in some of the most important functions of education.

In its earlier stages those who claimed the benefit of the new system were chiefly drawn from the intellectual _elite_--i.e., from the classes which had had the monopoly of knowledge, though it was not Western knowledge, before the introduction of Western education.

With the success which the new system achieved the demand grew rapidly, and the quality of the output diminished as it increased in quantity.

On the one hand education came to be regarded by the Indian public less and less as an end in itself, and more and more as merely an avenue either to lucrative careers or to the dignified security of appointments, however modest, under Government, and, in either case, to a higher social _status_, which ultimately acquired a definite money value in the matrimonial market.

The grant-in-aid system led to the foundation of large numbers of schools and colleges under private native management, in which the native element became gradually supreme or at least vastly predominant, and it enabled them to adopt so low a scale of fees that many parents who had never dreamt of literacy for themselves were encouraged to try and secure for some at least of their children the benefit of this miraculous Open Sesame to every kind of worldly advancement.