Calcutta University wields over our language is not strengthening and vitalising, but pedantic and narrow. It tries to purpetuate the anachronism of preserving the Pundit-made Bengali swathed in grammer-wrappings borrowed from a dead language. It is every day becoming a more formidable obstacle in the way of our boys' acquiring that mastery of their mother tongue which is of life and literature. The artificial language of a learned mediocrity, inert and formal, ponderous and didactic, devoid of the least breath of creative vitality, is forced upon our boys at the most receptive period of their life. I know this, because I have to connive, myself, at a kind of intellectual infanticide when my own students try to drown the natural spontaneity of their expression under some stagnant formalism. It is the old man of the sea keeping his fatal hold upon the youth of our country. And this makes me apprehensive lest the stamping of death's seal upon our living language should be performed on a magnified scale by our university as its final act of tyranny at the last hour of its direct authority.
In the modern European universities the medium of instruction being the vernacular, the students in receiving, recording and communicating their lessons perpetually come into intimate touch with it, making its acquaintance where it is not slavishly domineered over by one particular sect of academicians. The personalities of various authors, the individualities of their styles, the revelation of the living power of their language are constantly and closely brought to their minds and therefore all that they need for their final degrees is a knowledge of the history and morphology of their mother-tongues. But our students have not the same opportunity, excepting in their private studies and according to their private tastes. And therefore their minds are more liable to come under the
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