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