them, as among ourselves, every man is disposed to
rate his own abilities highly, and to have a good deal of confidence
in his own good luck; and all think that if the field were once
opened to them by such a change, they should very soon be able to
find good places for themselves and their children in it. Perhaps
there are few communities in the world among whom education is more
generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India. He who holds an
office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an
education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the
medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our
colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin--that is,
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the
young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled
with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the
young man raw from Oxford--he will talk as fluently about Socrates
and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (_alias_
Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and,
what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has
learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through
life.[35] He therefore thinks himself as well fitted to fill the high
offices which are now filled exclusively by Europeans, and naturally
enough wishes the establishments of that power would open them to
him. On the faculties and operations of the human mind, on man's
passions and affections, and his duties in all relations of life, the
works of Imam Muhammad Ghazali[36] and Nasir-ud-din Tusi[37] hardly
yield to those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other
authors who have written on the same subjects in any country. These
works, the _Ihya-ul-ulum_, epitomized into the _Kimia-i-Saadat_, and
the _Akhlak-i-Nasiri_, with the didactic poems of Sadi,[38] are the
great 'Pierian spring' of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan
delights to 'drink deep' from infancy to old age; and a better spring
it would be difficult to find in the works of any other three men.

It is not only the desire for office that makes the educated
Muhammadans cherish the recollection of the old regime in Hindustan:
they say, 'We pray every night for the Emperor and his family,
because our forefathers ate the salt of his forefathers'; that is,
our ancestors were in the service of his ancestors; and,
consequ