be ruled out. At any rate, nowhere was there any suggestion
made that it was much less than it had been in 1822-25. The
population of the Madras Presidency in 1823 was estimated at
1,28,50,941, while the population of England in 1811 was
estimated at 95,43,610. It may be noted from this that, while the
differences in the population of the two regions were not that
significant, the numbers of those attending the various types of
schools (Charity, Sunday, Circulating) in England were in all in
the neighbourhood of around 75,000 as compared to at least
double this number within the Madras Presidency. Further, more
than half of this number of 75,000 in English schools consisted of
those who attended school at the most only for 2-3 hours on a
Sunday.
However, after about 1803, every year a marked increase
took place in the number of those attending schools in England.
The result: the number of 75,000 attending any sort of school
around 1800 rose to 6,74,883 by 1818, and 21,44,377 in 1851,
i.e. an increase of about 29 times in a period of about fifty years.
It is true that the content of this education in England did not
improve much during this half century. Neither did the period
spent in school increase: from more than an average of one year in
1835 to about two years in 1851. The real implication of Gandhi-
ji’s observation, and of the information provided by the Madras
Presidency collectors, W. Adam and G.W. Leitner, is that for the
following 50-100 years, what happened in India—within the
developing situation of relative collapse and stagnation—proved
the reverse of the developments taking place in England. It is
such a feeling, and the intuition of such an occurrence, that
drove Gandhiji, firstly, to make his observation in London in
October 1931, and secondly, disinclined to withdraw it eight
years later. Gandhiji seemed to be looking at the issue from a
historical, social, and a human viewpoint. In marked contrast,
men like Sir Philip Hartog, as so commonly characteristic of the
specialist, were largely quibbling about phrases; intent solely on
picking holes in what did not fit the prevailing western theories
of social and political development.
Statistical comparisons were what Sir Philip Hartog and
many others in his time wanted. And these can, to a large
extent, settle this debate: some comparison of the 1822-25
Madras school-attending scholars is made here with the Madras
Presidency data pertaining to the 1880s and 1890s. Because of
incompleteness of the earlier data available from Bengal and
Bihar, and also from the Presidency of Bombay,^78 such a
comparison