case was properly put before them, but they felt that if they were not to become the victims of organized misrepresentation they must have an organization of their own which should speak for them with authority.  Moreover, it was impossible for the Mahomedans to stand any longer completely aloof from politics, since the general trend of events in India and the enlargement of the Indian Councils had thrust new responsibilities upon the leaders of their community.  Of those responsibilities none was more fully realized than that of showing their loyalty to the British Raj—­a loyalty all the more unalterable in that it was based upon their growing conviction that the maintenance of the British Raj was essential to the welfare, and even to the existence, of the Mahomedans of India.

As I write I have before me a letter from another Mahomedan friend, a man both of European education and very wide knowledge of his Indian co-religionists, with whom he enjoys exceptional credit.  I was so much impressed with the prevalence of this form of fatalism that I wrote and asked him for his opinion.  This is his answer:—­

Moslems feel that while at present the Government in India is British in spirit as well as in name, there are already indications that it might gradually become Hindu in fact, though the British form might remain.  The whole object of the advanced Congress Party and of the leaders of the Nationalist movement is not the overthrow of British rule in name, but in fact.  You may say that this is a wild apprehension, and that the Government is not foolish enough or weak enough to degenerate into a mere form.  That may be the attitude of an Englishman who is in India only as a bird of passage (and all Englishmen are there as birds of passage, for only those whose children belong to the country are permanently bound up with it).  For us who live here, and whose children are to live here, the distant as well as the immediate future is of essential importance.  Now what is the tendency of Government?  Can any one deny that, taken as a whole, it is towards Hindu predominance in the long run?  English observers must not forget that there is throughout India amongst Hindus a strong tendency towards imitating the National movements that have proved successful in European history.  Now, while vis-a-vis the British the Hindu irreconcilables assume the attitude of the Italian patriots towards the hated Austrian, vis-a-vis the Moslems there is a very different European model for them to follow.  Not only Tilak and his school in Poona, but throughout the Punjab and Bengal the constant talk of the Nationalists is that the Moslems must be driven out of India as they were driven out of Spain.

This is no invention of ours.  Nor is it quite so wild as it appears at first sight.  I have gone into the matter carefully and I can certainly conceive circumstances—­50 or 100 years hence—­that would make India intolerable