reference to which the report furnishes detailed statistics the United
Provinces alone failed to show the same disparity, the number of posts
held by the Mahomedans, 453, against 711 held by Hindus, being actually
and very largely in excess of their proportion to population. The
Mahomedans, moreover, complain that where Mahomedans are employed as
clerks in Government Departments the head clerks, who are almost always
Hindus and alone have direct access to the English superior officers,
use their influence with the latter to prejudice them against their
Mahomedan subordinates. Education has passed very largely from our own
hands into those of Hindu teachers. In all the liberal professions, at
the Bar, in the Press, the preponderance of Hindus is greatly out of
proportion even to the numerical preponderance of the Hindu population
as a whole. Intelligent Mahomedans are conscious that all this is to a
great extent the result of the backwardness of their community, but
hardships are none the less hardships because they are largely of one's
own making. Again, the principal seat of the Government of India and
those of the two great Presidency Governments are in centres of Hindu
life where the voice of the Mahomedan element does not make itself
easily heard.

Then Mahomedans who watch public opinion in England note that one of the
two great parties in the State has for many years past professed to
recognize in the views of Hindu politicians a commendable affinity to
its own political principles, whilst the memory of its greatest leader,
Mr. Gladstone, is chiefly associated in India with a violent hostility
to Turkey, which, at any rate amongst many of his followers, degenerated
into violent denunciations of Islam in general. By his personal
qualities Lord Ripon, the most pronounced Liberal ever sent out in our
time as Viceroy, endeared himself to many Mahomedans as well as to the
Hindus, but he never made any secret of his political sympathies with