Waite the Christian Societies in England and the United States are constantly collecting large sums of money, and spending them in the effort to Christianise Asia, with what impartial missionaries must allow to be somewhat inadequate results, a movement has been and is going on in India, of which few of us have any idea. Under the heading "A Pact from Bengal," the Spectator tells us in a recent issue that "the great Mussulman effort to convert Eastern India, which has lasted centuries, has so far succeeded that Bengal Proper which is not, be it remembered, identical with the Bengal Presidency, is now a Mahommedan country; that is to say, the Mussulmans exceed the Hindus in a population which way be roughly taken at forty millions, by a million and a half." This is not due to avy immigration of Mahommedans. "A few Arab missionaries, renews from age to age, have settled there, and still, we believe, are proud of their special blood, and a considerable number of Pathans have been attracted by high pay to fight the battles of the old officers of Delhi and the great nobles who resisted them, and have remained in the land; but the millions are undoubtedly converted Hindus, or, in a much smaller proportion, ' Animists/—the new name given in the Indian Census of 1891 to the tribes below Hinduism which we class savage." There are three great offers which the Mahommedan missionaries make, and which have a perfectly intelligible attraction for the Hindus, especially for the poorer classes. These are: (1) release from the misery of being responsible for sins committed in previous stages of existence, an ever present and depressing misery to the burden of a ceremonial law far heavier than that which still binds the Jews; and (3) admission on terms of absolute equality into the mightiest of the castes, the one which still claims as its right dominance within the Empire. "'The conversion has not been by villages, or even districts, at a time, but family after family has dropped away, its head accepting the Faith, until there are districts in Eastern Bengal, still popularly supposed to be Hindu, where the Mus-sultans are three or four to one, and the Hindu community seems, whenever a quarrel arises, to exist on sufferance. The people,' properly so called, are in such districts Mussulman, and the usages of society, its political ideas, and even its outward bearing, are all adapting themselves slowly to that fact. 'I'he relations of the tenantry to their landlords, for example, become seriously changed, the Mussulman being far more dangerous to oppress in the old ways."
The process is going on, we are told, and it is interesting to note that in Bengal Mahommedanism is not being propagated by the sword, to which entirely, we used to be told, it owed its success; and it is going on not merely through conversion, but from the curious but undoubted fact that the Mussulmans of Bengal multiply by natural increase perceptibly faster than the Hindus. "This may be due to difference in diet, or to some traditional superiority in the management of very young children, or, the Spectator suggests, to "the operation of one of those my-serious Jaws which enable Anglo-Saxons to double their numbers in every fifty years, while Jews, the healthiest and most universally married of all races, take centuries to increase in like proportion—they have barely doubled in the last sixteen hundred years." 'I'hen the simplicity of the Mahommedan religion is a great attraction. There is oué God, one Prophet, and one Sacred Law clear and unalterable. As weak or tired minds in Europe turn to the Roman Catholic Church, grateful for the relief infallibility gives them, so the ed vexed Hindus embrace Mahommedavism and are thankful for "its simple explanation of all puzzles as part of the will of the unconditioned God." Lastly, the lowest castes of Hinduism are begiuing to rebel at the degraded position in which the Hindu system keeps them. Ybey have been petitioning the Indian government to relieve them from their most unpleasant duties, and make their high-caste neighbours treat them with more respect. he government, however, can do very little; but the Mussulmans can do everything, "Let a Chamar or Chundal—et us say, merely to be intel-eligible, a hereditary vight-soil -man—declare himself a Mussulman, and go through the initiatory rite, and he is instantly, as far as theory goes, the equal of every other follower of Mahomet, may dine in any house, may marry the daughter, if he wins his way up, of the highest noble in the land." With
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.