nd communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt
strong in the undivided support which his conception of his
responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then,
and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a
fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any
surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure
solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far
more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political
agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still
had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content
with the British _raj_ and wanted nothing else.

The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in
his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him
not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive
support of very important classes and communities. He knew also that he
had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid
on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of
his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty
years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and
governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days,
periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a
concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The
very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian
administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and
the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before
almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign
policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor,
or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the
Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir
British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often
chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to
be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their
general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the
methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to "the
man on the spot."

Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and