variably give the feeling that one has strayed into a "place of worship" not very far from one's own parish church. Moreover, Mahometanism shares with the more popularly governed Protestant sects a liability to periodical revivals of religion. A time comes when all the historical glosses and interpretations which have incrusted the sacred text seem to break away, and when all the compromises by which the principles of the faith have been reconciled to existing facts, begin to excite repugnance or horror. An enthusiasm, almost invariably beginning with some one person, spreads like a contagion among believers; and it is nearly invariably an enthusiasm for restoring the simple literal rule as it appears in the text of the Sacred Book. The radical difference between Mahometanism and Christianity shows itself, not in the process of recurrence to first principles, which is much the same in both cases, but in the character of the principles which it is sought to apply in their integrity. This may be illustrated by the example of Quakerism, the most thorough and famous, and nearly the oldest of Protestant Christian revivals. The peculiar dress of the Quakers, and the fashions of speech for which they found imperative directions in the Bible, have no more interest than the interdiction of tobacco, which the Mahometan Revivalists see clearly written in certain texts of the Koran; but nothing can be more striking than the distinction between the great cardinal rule which the enthusiasts believed themselves in the two cases to have discovered in God's Word. However true it may have been that, as a matter of fact, Christianity was destined to bring into the world not peace, but a sword, nobody can wonder that the Quakers extracted from the text of the New Testament the principle of peace among men. It is quite as natural that the new Mahometan sect should have found among their authorities a positive exhortation to make war under certain cicumstances. The absolute duty of sacred war—of what Sir Herbert Edwardes taught Indian of ficials to call a Crescentade-is in fact the great article of the renovated Mahom

etan creed.

The contagious enthusiasm of religious revivals is almost always, as we have said, originally generated in some one individual. He is often a person whom it is

nearly impossible to respect. It has been rather a trial to modern sentimental admirers of Quakerism that its founder was unquestionably a very vulgar and illiterate fellow. Syud Ahmed, the originator of the Mahometan revival in India, appears to have been-and the contrast with Fox is significant-a very perfect specimen of the violent Oriental blackguard. "He began life," says Mr. Hunter, "as a horsesoldier in the service of a celebrated freebooter, who harried the rich opium-growing villages of Malwa;" but, when the trade of a bandit became dangerous and unprofitable, through the stern order which the great Sikh adventurer and chief, Runjeet Singh, imposed on his Mussulman neighbors, Syud Ahmed "suited himself to the times, gave up robbery, and, about 1816, went to study the sacred law under a doctor of high repute at Delhi." A reputation for devoutness is not, however, quite as easily obtained among Mahometans as in some Christian communities, and Syud Ahmed had to make a pilgrimage to Mecca-about as formidable an undertaking to a native of Upper India as can be well conceived. At Mecca he came under the influences which gave its singularity to his subsequent Indian career. The sacred city had been only lately. recovered by the arms of Mehemet Ali of Egypt from the dominion of that strange sect of reformed Mahometans-the Wahabees-which had been formed a hundred years earlier by the preaching of Abdul Wahab of Nejd. Violently suppressed by a combined effort on the part of all orthodox Islam, they revived after a time sufficiently to form the little Arabian State which attracted so much interest a year or two since through the description of it given by Mr. Palgrave. Still more recently, the advances of this warlike power towards the principalities protected by the English on the Persian Gulf had to be carefully watched by the Indian Government, and at this very moment it is understood to be making a desperate resistance to the flower of the army which the Turkish Sultan has restored to efficiency through the money he has borrowed wholesale in Europe. The peculiar religious doctrines of the Wahabees must have lingered at Mecca when Syud Ahmed was there, for he came back to India not merely invested with the stately spiritual. dignity of a returned Mahometan pilgrim,

but animated with the fanaticism of a Wahabee propagandist. Immediately after his landing at Bombay he is said to have begun preaching on the special articles of the reformed faith. Among the most striking of these tenets were a rejection of all mediatory agency between God and man, so absolute as even to exclude the mediation of Mahomet himself; a new and professedly more literal interpretation of the text of the Koran; the repudiation of the comparatively few ceremonies and observances which have grown up within the pale of Mahometanism, including the practice of erecting the beautiful tombs which charm the Eastern traveller; and a constant waiting and looking for the appearance of the new Prophet who is to lead the Faithful to victory. With these doctrines, which are made respectable to us by our own religious associations, the original Wahabees coupled a long string of childish and vexatious prohibitions. But, in the preaching of the Indian apostle, all the new opinions, respectable or ridiculous, were practically subordinated to one great article of belief. This was the imperative duty of sacred war against infidel rulers. Nearly all India was under the government of Christians or Hindoos. Of the mighty Mahometan empire, which had once covered the whole country with its shadow, only two considerable fragments remained, the state governed by the prince called the Nizam in the south, and the kingdom of Oudh in the north, the latter ruled, indeed, by a Mahometan sovereign, but a sovereign who belonged to an heretical sect. No assumption is more distinctly made by the original records of Islam than that, wherever there are Mahometans, they govern the country. There are plenty of texts to regulate the relations between Mahometan rulers and unbelieving subjects; none whatever to define the duty of Mahometan subjects towards an infidel government. A reformer who sought to revive the principles of Mahomet's tendency in their primitive. purity, had his attention fixed by the necessity of the case on the great anomaly before his eyes. Mahometans were obeying Christians and Hindoos, and holding their religious privileges by the unholy tenure of infidel toleration or favor. This was the crying sin and shame which Syud Ahmed and his followers set themselves to denounce. The teaching of the Waha

bee missionaries in India came thus to consist in placing an alternative before the faithful-either fight or emigrate. The literal duty of fighting may sometimes be postponed by paying tithes out of your substance to support armies which are being levied for sacred war; but, if you cannot subscribe, you must send your sons to the camp. Mr. Hunter quotes from Wahabee compositions some remarkable passages setting forth the alternative blessings of war or emigration. "Holy war" it is written in one of these-" sends copious showers at seasonable times, abundant supplies of vegetable produce, good times, so that people are void of care and free from calamities, whilst their property increases in value and there is an increase in the number of learned men, the justness of judges, the conscientiousness of suitors, and the liberality of the rich. These blessings, increased a hundred-fold, are granted when the dignity of the Mahometan religion is upheld, and Mahometan kings, possessing powerful armies, become exalted and promulgate and enforce the Mahometan law in all countries." If, therefore, the Holy War succeeds, there will be no more famines in India, no more judicial corruption, no more fraudulent or unjust litigation. The spiritual advantages of the other branch of the alternative

emigration to an orthodox country-are illustrated by a striking apologue which Mr. Hunter gives at length. An Israelite, after commiting the most awful crimes, was warned by a holy man that his lot would be eternal punishment unless he sincerely repented and departed from the land of the infidel. He began his journey, but did not live to complete it, and the Angels of Mercy and Punishment had a contest for his soul. The point in dispute between them was decided by actual measurement. It was found that one foot of the penitent Israelite had crossed the boundary of a kingdom of Islam; and so the dead man was saved.

A good many obscure local disturbances which took place in British India, and particularly in the North-Eastern Provinces, between 1820 and 1850, have now been clearly traced to Wahabee agitation and propagandism, but it was not the British Indian Empire which had to bear the first serious shock from the new religious movement. The system of States united in a compact despotic monarchy by

Runjeet Singh was the first object of Syud Ahmed's agressions. Here, if anywhere, the Mahometans had what, with our ideas, we should call a real grievance. The Sikhs, a body of Hindoo sectaries, had imbibed a stern fanaticism of their own from religious reform, and they dealt out to the Mahometans who dwelt among them pretty much the same treatment which Hindoos had occasionally received in Mahometan States under specially bigoted sovereigns. The Call to Prayer was forbidden, the killing of cows was severely punished. The Mahometans of the Punjab have indeed at this hour the peculiar submissive look of a long-oppressed and down trodden community. Partly in order to have a base for his operations against the great Sikh chief, and partly, doubtless, to give a point and meaning to the exhortations of his Indian emissaries on the subject of emigration to the territory of Islam, the Prophet fixed his residence among the mountaineers of the hills on the western side of the Indus. The descriptions of the Scottish Highlanders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which we owe to the genius of Macaulay and Walter Scott, would be absolutely true of these wild Pathan tribes, but for one great feature of difference. Their religion always sat very lightly on the Highlandmen: the tribes of the trans-Indus mountains are furiously bigoted to Mahometanism. This zeal for religion does little to heal the "blood-feuds" of the Pathan clans, the state of permanent inter-tribal warfare which they have inherited from quarrels and jealousies of immemorial date; but for the purpose of combining them against a common infidel enemy, it may be turned into a temporary bond of union far stronger than the common devotion to the House of Stuart or common hatred of the House of Argyll, which, from time to time, animated the great Highland confederacies. The new Prophet inflamed the tribes to madness by his preaching. "Their avarice," says Mr. Hunter, was enlisted by splendid promises of plunder; their religion by the assurance that he was divinely commissioned to extirpate the whole infidel world, from the Sikhs even unto the Chinese." Some of the raids which he organized into the dominions of Runjeet Singh, which lay below the mountains, assumed the proportions of nilitary expeditions, and on

one occasion he even captured Peshawur, the western capital of the Sikh prince. On the whole, however, the advantage remained with the stubborn and warlike race whom Suyd Ahmed was attacking, disciplined as they now were by European military adventurers in the pay of Runjeet Singh. The prophet was surprised by the Sikhs in 1831, and killed in battle. But the succession to his office continued. One of his lieutenants, with signal ingenuity, turned to his own purposes both the fanaticism and the quarrelsomeness of the North-Western hill tribes. He acquired their veneration as a hermit and ascetic, and obtained from them a grant of lands which were to be neutral ground forever, whither the man with the avenger of blood behind him might always flee for refuge. Here was founded Sitana, the fanatical colony, famous in the recent military history of India. Long before the British Government came into direct conflict with the fanatics through the annexation of the Punjab, much of their activity and occasional success would have been unintelligible, but for the influences which radiated backwards and forwards between British India and this settlement. The emissaries of the prophet had in fact organized a system of religious and rebellious propagandism among the Mahometans of the richest and most populous provinces of the British Indian Empire. Money was constantly flowing from our dominions to Sitana, and, unless fed by money, the fanaticism of the mountaineers is a flame which blazes and burns out. The more ardent or poorer devotees of the Wahabee cause went themselves or sent their sons to the sacred settlement. The subscription of money was only a temporary compromise allowed until the actual Jehad or Holy War should break out, but emigration to a land of Islam was an alternative clearly permitted by the Prophet, and Sitana belonged pre-eminently to Islam. The soldiers of the faith thus recruited were by no means of the best military material which India affords; it is somewhat singular that the Wahabee fanaticism prevails nearly exclusively among the least warlike races of the country. But the emigrants had their whole heart in the cause; for it they were capable of the utmost self-denial; and thus they formed a nucleus of association peculiarly valuaable when the bulk of the confederacy

had to consist of fickle and avaricious Pathan Highlanders.

The British conquest of the Punjab, provoked by the wanton aggression of the Sikh captains, brought the Indian Government face to face with the fanatics of Sitana and their allies. The mountaineers of the North-Western hills became our next-door neighbors. If the special Wahabee hatred of infidel rulers depended in any way on such grievances as civilized men can recognize (and our sole complaint against Mr. Hunter is that he some times seems to assume a real connection between the two), the hostility of the fanatics ought to have been signally moderated by the policy now pursued in the territories close to them. The new governors of the Punjab began to treat the Mahometans on precisely the same footing as the Sikhs. The Call to Prayer was again heard, and the killing of the cow for beef, a privilege valued by Mahometans in proportion to its odiousness in the eyes of their Hindoo fellow-countrymen, was again permitted. Even as we write, the news comes to England that the British authorities in the Punjab have just had to suppress a sanguinary riot in the great commerical city of Umritsur, arising out of an attack of the Sikh populace on the shops of the hateful Mahometan butchers. Yet the colony at Sitana has stirred up just as many coalitions of the tribes against our power as ever it did against our oppressive Sikh predecessors. It would be hardly exaggeration to say that we have been at perpetual war with these mountaineers ever since our conquest. At least two regular campaigns have been undertaken against them, of which the story is very clearly and vividly told in the volume before us. One of them, still remembered as the Umbeyla campaign, very nearly ended in a serious disaster. It was ill-planned, though probably the mistakes of conception were unavoidable, so imperfect is our knowledge of the marvellously difficult country occupied by the clans, and so hard is it to judge at any given time what amount of combination among the tribes is at the back of a particular movement. The troops were completely brought to a check in a most dangerous position, and still more unfortunately the difficulty occurred just when the Indian Government was partially dislocated by the sudden death of the Vice

roy, Lord Eigin. But a few days of hesitation were followed by a vigorous advance, a panic spread among the confederates, and they finally agreed to expel the fanatics and dismantle Sitana. This occurred in 1863, but again in 1868 a large force had to occupy the Black Mountain, a fragment of the same highland country which lies on the east bank of the Indus, and the troops, who practically met on this occasion with no resistance, were able just before they retired to catch a sight of the fanatical emigrants moving on the opposite bank of the great river. Mr. Hunter sums up the force which has had on various occasions to move out against the fanatics and their allies. The aggregate is very considerable, though it is a little dwarfed by the enormous totals to which the latest European wars have accustomed us. If indeed we were to count the cost in money, the result would fairly bear comparison with the military expenditure of European powers. All war and all waiting for war are in India enormously expensive, and, putting the cost of suppressing the Sepoy Mutiny aside, the great cause of military outlay has of late years been, the control of the North-Western frontier. In fact, when we speak of the military occupation of India we mean in reality the military occupation of the parts of the Punjab adjacent to this boundary. Here the great bulk of our troops are collected. Here alone in India the soldier finds excitement to vary the dull monotony of peace. Here is the school in which some of the best of our military officers have been trained--Lord Napier of Magdala, Lord Sandhurst, Sir Sidney Cotton, and Sir Neville Chamberlain; and here Lord Lawrence acquired his rare aptitude for the civil side of military administration. The truth is, that India is in very much the same state in which Great Britian would be if the Highlands had remained to our day without change since the years before 1745. To complete the parallel, however, we must suppose the Highlanders to be animated with all the devotion to Rome and all the detestation of Protestantism which characterize the Celts of Ireland, and we must conceive trials of Jacobites for treason to be still occurring, and Jacobite squires in the south of England to be constantly remitting subsidies to a Papal legate somewhere in the Grampians for the use of the Camerons, the

Frasers, or the Macgregors. Mr. Hunter devotes a great deal of his space to a description of the mechanism of conspiracy organized for almost half a century in North-Eastern India, and he illustrates it very completely by comparing it to the Fenian distribution of functions between Head Centres and District-Centres in the United States. Patna, in Behar, has been to the Wahabee fanatics what New York has been to the Fenians, and the various local depositaries of the secret are now known to have corresponded with one another, with their chiefs, and with the exiles at Sitana in a sort of ciphered language, borrowed from the ordinary transactions of Indian trade. In their letters and messages, a battle became a "law-suit," God was the "Law-agent;" remittances for Sitana in gold mohurs were spoken of as rosaries of red beads, and remittances in money as the price of books and merchandise; drafts or money orders became white stones, the amount being intimated by the number of white beads on a rosary. During the last few years, the Indian Government has more and more got its eye and hand on these subaltern intrigues; nor, in our opinion, is there the least ground for misgiving as to its power of protecting itself against them. The one great danger to the British Indian Empire is ignorance of facts; once alive to these, its rulers are much too ably and energetically served for any conspiracy to have appreciable chances of success. We must own with some shame that the chief difficulties of the Indian Government in dealing with the Wahabee movement have been created by Englishmen. On the whole, it has treated the detected conspirators with singular leniency. Only two of them have been brought to trial, and the one last prosecuted would probably never have been tried at all but for an outcry got up among the Englishmen of Calcutta against the proceedings in his case. The man, a rich Mahometan, who owed his fortune to the English Government, but was afterwards shown to have been all his life a centre of conspiracy against it, was arrested in Calcutta, and detained near it in honorable custody under some special powers conferred by law on the Governor-General, which seem to us a marvel of moderation and considerateness by the side of those given to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the West

meath and Peace Preservation Acts. Nobody, however, who knows what Englishmen are all over the world can wonder that a writ of habeas corpus was moved for in the local tribunal, or that it should have been argued that the British Constitution had been violated by the confinement of an Oriental fanatic debauched by religious principles imparted from Central Arabia. Still, it might have been at least expected that, in a country in which to be vituperated is to be weak, the advocates for this Wahabee sectary would refrain from speaking of the Government which represented the British race in language about equally colored with animosity and contempt. Nobody, however, profited less by these proceedings than the Mahometan conspirator himself. The Indian Government appears to have felt itself compelled to bring him to regular trial; he was convicted the other day on the clearest evidence, and sentenced to transportation for life.

The Indian Mahometans have recently had their numbers increased to some extent by successful proselytism in Eastern Bengal, but they are undoubtedly, on the whole, a sinking and decaying community. Nobody who knows what their government of India was can regret it, or regret that our own Government, which has succeeded it, is, in the main, a government in the interest of the Hindoos, or, in other words, of the enormous majority of the population. Still, among thirty millions of men, which is the total roughly assigned to the Mahometans of India, there will be great numbers too sensible, too comfortable, or too timid to be ready to engage in a vulgar, fanatical, and now very dangerous, conspiracy. This is the class of Indian Mahometans on whose behalf Mr. Hunter asks, on his title-page, the question, "Are they bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen?" The exhortations and denunciations of the Wahabee missionaries have caused them a discomfort which we, with our Western ideas, have the greatest difficulty in understanding. For the most part, we receive with the utmost equanimity the imputation of theological or political error. That men of the same race, country, and religion as ourselves should consider us to be in the wrong on a number of vital points, we take to be a matter of course, and we are generally ready to let them keep their