lish itself one day as the prevailing religion of the
Continent. Its moral advance within recent times in the Malay
Archipelago, in China, in Tartary, and in India, encourages the
supposition that under alien rule Mohammedanism will be able to hold its
own, and more than own, against all rivals, and that in the decay of
Buddhism it, and not Christianity, will be the form under which God will
eventually be worshipped in the Tropics. Its progress among the Malays
under Dutch rule is certainly an astonishing phenomenon, and, taken in
connection with a hardly less remarkable progress in Equatorial Africa,
may well console those Mussulmans who see in the loss of their temporal
dominions northwards signs of the decay of Islam. Could such a
reformation as was suggested in my last chapter be indeed effected, the
vigour of conversion would doubtless be redoubled, independently of any
condition of political prosperity in the ancient seats of Mohammedan
dominion. I do not, therefore, see in territorial losses a sign of
Islam's ruin as a moral and intellectual force in the world.

It is time, however, to consider the special part destined to be played
by England in the drama of the Mussulman future. England, if I
understand her history rightly, stands towards Islam in a position quite
apart from that of the rest of the European States. These I have
described as continuing a tradition of aggression inherited from the
Crusades, and from the bitter wars waged by the Latin and Greek Empires
against the growing power of the Ottoman Turks. In the latter England
took no part, her religious schism having already separated her from the
general interests of Catholic Europe, while she had withdrawn from the
former in the still honourable stage of the adventure, and consequently
remained with no humiliating memories to avenge. She came, therefore,
into her modern relations with Mohammedans unprejudiced against them,
and able to treat their religious and political opinions in a humane and
liberal spirit, seeking of them practical advantages of trade rather
than conquest. Nor has the special nature of her position towards them
been unappreciated by Mohammedans.

In spite of the deceptions on some points of late years, and recent
vacillations of policy towards them, the still independent nations of
Islam see in England something different from the rest of Christendom,
something not in its nature hostile to them, or regardless of their
rights and