mission in India was to hold the balance evenly between the different races and creeds and classes, and to exercise its paternal authority equally to the detriment of none and for the benefit of all.  That the Hindus had from the beginning secured a considerably larger share in Government employment of all kinds was, no doubt, inevitable, as they had shown much greater alacrity to qualify themselves by education on Western lines than the Mahomedans, unfortunately, had until much more recently begun to show.  But so long as Government employes were merely the servants of Government, and Hindus had no more influence than the Mahomedans in shaping the policy of the Government, the Mahomedans had no serious grievance, or, at any rate, none for which they had not themselves very largely to blame.  But of late years they had seen the policy of the British Government itself gradually yielding to the pressure of Hindu agitation and the British Raj actually divesting itself of some of the powers which it had hitherto retained undiminished for the benefit, in fact if not in theory, of certain classes which, however loudly they might claim to be the representatives of the Indian people, represented with few exceptions nothing but the political ambitions of aggressive Hinduism.  The Mahomedans, they assured me, recognized quite as fully as, and perhaps, more sincerely than, the Hindus the generous spirit which had inspired the British Government to grant the reforms embodied in the Indian Councils Act, but they also realized what it was far more difficult for Englishmen to realize, that those reforms must inevitably tend to give the Hindus a predominant share, as compared with the Mahomedans, in the counsels of Government.  In its original shape the scheme of reforms had indeed threatened the Mahomedans with gross unfairness and the wrath which its subsequent modification in deference to Mahomedan representations had roused among the Hindu politicians was in itself enough to betray to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear the purpose to which they had hoped to turn the excessive predominance they had claimed and expected.  That purpose was to advance the political ascendency of Hinduism which was the goal of Hindu aspirations, whether under the British Raj or without it.

The whole tendency of the Hindu revival, social, religious, and political, during the last 20 years had been as consistently anti-Mahomedan as anti-British, and even more so.  Some of the more liberal and moderate Hindu leaders no doubt honestly contemplated the evolution of an Indian “nation” in which Mahomedan and Hindu might sink their racial and religious differences, but these were leaders with a constantly diminishing body of followers.  Even among the Extremists not a few would gladly have purchased by pious professions of good will a temporary alliance with the Mahomedans against the British Raj, subject to an ulterior settlement of accounts for their own benefit.