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Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion.

"From the period of the abdication of Shermanoo, to that of the arrival of the Portuguese at Calicut, the Mahomedan religion had made considerable progress in Malabar; and the Arabian merchants received every encouragement from the Samoories or Zamorins, as they made Calicut the staple of their Indian trade, and brought large sums of money yearly to that place, for the purchase of spiceries and other commodities.

At length we reached a small doorway which opened into a cavern black as Erebus. For a moment we paused undecided; and then out of the darkness crawled an aged Mahomedan bearing a tiny cocoanut-oil lamp. Lifting it above his head he pointed silently to a rickety staircase in the far corner, up which we groped our way with the help of a rope pendent from an upper beam.

Mahomedan Proverb. Some people say that there is no romance in India. Those people are wrong. Our lives hold quite as much romance as is good for us. Sometimes more. Strickland was in the Police, and people did not understand him; so they said he was a doubtful sort of man and passed by on the other side. Strickland had himself to thank for this.

In 1878 when the Swat River Canal, which has turned the desert plain of Yusufzai into one great wheat-field, was under construction, the more pestilential class of mullah, always on the look-out for a cause to inflame Mahomedan fanaticism against the English unbeliever, stirred up the tribesmen to interfere with the work.

It would be no departure in substance from the purpose of our suggestion, that there should be a separate Mahomedan electorate an electorate exclusively Mahomedan; and in view of the wide and remote distances, and difficulties of organisation in consequence of those distances in the area constituting a large province, I am not sure that this is not one of those cases where election by two stages would not be convenient, and so there might be a separate electoral college exclusively Mahomedan.

I have been endeavoring to inform myself at all times on this subject; of late my duty has led me to a more minute inspection of them; and I do challenge the whole race of man to show me any of the Oriental governors claiming to themselves a right to act by arbitrary will. The greatest part of Asia is under Mahomedan governments. To name a Mahomedan government is to name a government by law.

Few of the natives appeared to be marked with it, which may have been owing, perhaps, to their escaping this disorder for some years. Vaccination has not yet been introduced among them, nor have they practiced inoculation. Notwithstanding Soung was once the Mecca of the East, its people have but little zeal for the Mahomedan faith.

Of such men more or less consciously recognizing this law, there are in our time, not in the Christian world alone, but in the Buddhistic, Mahomedan, Confucian, and Brahminic world, not only thousands but millions.

During my stay in Calcutta, I could learn no more of the manners and customs of the Hindoos than what I have described, but I became acquainted with some of the particulars of a Mahomedan marriage.