children in it.  Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India.  He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister.  They learn, through the medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin—­that is, grammar, rhetoric, and logic.  After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—­he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna:  (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.[35] He therefore thinks himself as well fitted to fill the high offices which are now filled exclusively by Europeans, and naturally enough wishes the establishments of that power would open them to him.  On the faculties and operations of the human mind, on man’s passions and affections, and his duties in all relations of life, the works of Imam Muhammad Ghazali[36] and Nasir-ud-din Tusi[37] hardly yield to those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other authors who have written on the same subjects in any country.  These works, the Ihya-ul-ulum, epitomized into the Kimia-i-Saadat, and the Akhlak-i-Nasiri, with the didactic poems of Sadi,[38] are the great ‘Pierian spring’ of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan delights to ‘drink deep’ from infancy to old age; and a better spring it would be difficult to find in the works of any other three men.

It is not only the desire for office that makes the educated Muhammadans cherish the recollection of the old regime in Hindustan:  they say, ’We pray every night for the Emperor and his family, because our forefathers ate the salt of his forefathers’; that is, our ancestors were in the service of his ancestors; and, consequently, were the aristocracy of the country.  Whether they really were so matters not; they persuade themselves or their children that they were.  This is a very common and a very innocent sort of vanity.  We often find Englishmen in India, and I suppose in all the rest of our foreign settlements, sporting high Tory opinions and feelings, merely with a view to have it supposed that their families are, or at some time were, among the aristocracy of the land.  To express a wish for Conservative predominance is the same thing with them as to express a wish for the promotion in the Army, Navy, or Church of some of their near relations; and thus to indicate that they are among the privileged class whose wishes the Tories would be obliged to consult were they in power.[39]