ound in
the ranks of disaffected politicians. For reasons, in fact, which I
shall set forth later on, it may be confidently asserted that never
before have the Mahomedans of India as a whole identified their
interests and their aspirations so closely as at the present day with
the consolidation and permanence of British rule. It is almost a
misnomer to speak of Indian unrest. Hindu unrest would be a far more
accurate term, connoting with far greater precision the forces
underlying it, though to use it without reservation would be to do a
grave injustice to the vast numbers of Hindus who are as yet untainted
with disaffection. These include almost all the Hindu ruling chiefs and
landed aristocracy, as well as the great mass of the agricultural
classes which form in all parts of India the overwhelming majority of
the population. Very large areas, moreover, are still entirely free from
unrest, which, except for a few sporadic outbreaks in other districts,
has been hitherto mainly confined to three distinct areas--the Mahratta
Deccan, which comprises a great part of the Bombay Presidency and
several districts of the Central Provinces, Bengal, with the new
province of Eastern Bengal, and the Punjab. In those regions it is the
large cities that have been the real hot-beds of unrest, and, great as
is their influence, it must not be forgotten that in India scarcely
one-tenth of the population lives in cities, or even in small townships
with more than 5,000 inhabitants. Whereas in England one-third of the
population is gathered together in crowded cities of 100,000 inhabitants
and over, there are but twenty-eight cities of that size in the whole of
India, with an aggregate population of less than 7,000,000 out of a
total of almost 300,000,000.

That a movement confined to a mere fraction of the population of India
has no title to be called a "national" movement would scarcely need to
be argued, even if the variegated jumble of races and peoples, castes
and creeds that make up the population of India were not in itself an
antithesis to all that the word "national" implies. Nevertheless it
would be equally foolish to underrate the forces which underlie this
movement, for they have one common _nexus_, and a very vital one. They
are the dominant forces of Hinduism--forces which go to the very root of
a social and religious system than which none in the history of the
human race has shown greater vitality and stability. Based upon ca