They acknowledged freely the shortcomings of their own community, its intellectual backwardness, its reluctance to depart from the ancient ways and to realize the necessity of equipping itself for successful competition under new conditions, its lack of organization, due to an inadequate sense of the duty of social service, and the selfishness and jealousy often displayed by different sections and classes.

They were beginning to awaken to the dangerous consequences of their shortcomings, but would time be given to them to repair them?
The British _Raj_ had always claimed that its mission in India was to hold the balance evenly between the different races and creeds and classes, and to exercise its paternal authority equally to the detriment of none and for the benefit of all.

That the Hindus had from the beginning secured a considerably larger share in Government employment of all kinds was, no doubt, inevitable, as they had shown much greater alacrity to qualify themselves by education on Western lines than the Mahomedans, unfortunately, had until much more recently begun to show.

But so long as Government _employes_ were merely the servants of Government, and Hindus had no more influence than the Mahomedans in shaping the policy of the Government, the Mahomedans had no serious grievance, or, at any rate, none for which they had not themselves very largely to blame.

But of late years they had seen the policy of the British Government itself gradually yielding to the pressure of Hindu agitation and the British _Raj_ actually divesting itself of some of the powers which it had hitherto retained undiminished for the benefit, in fact if not in theory, of certain classes which, however loudly they might claim to be the representatives of the Indian people, represented with few exceptions nothing but the political ambitions of aggressive Hinduism.
The Mahomedans, they assured me, recognized quite as fully as, and perhaps, more sincerely than, the Hindus the generous spirit which had inspired the British Government to grant the reforms embodied in the Indian Councils Act, but they also realized what it was far more difficult for Englishmen to realize, that those reforms must inevitably tend to give the Hindus a predominant share, as compared with the Mahomedans, in the counsels of Government.