The most trivial incident, the meeting of rival processions, the maltreatment of a cow, so sacred to the Hindus, some purely personal quarrel suddenly leads to violent affrays in which the whole populace on both sides joins in without knowing even what it is all about.

The danger must be enormously heightened if one community begins to believe that the other community is compassing deep-laid schemes for the promotion of its own ultimate ascendancy.

The political agitation conducted by the Hindus has for some time past tended to create such a belief amongst the Mahomedans.

As far back as 1893, at the time of the Bombay riots and of Tilak's "anti-cow-killing" propaganda in the Deccan, which spread sporadically to other parts of India, the Bombay Government reported "an uneasy feeling among Mahomedans that they and their faith were suffering at the hands of the Hindus, that they were being gradually but surely edged out of the position they have hitherto held, and that their religion needed some special protection." That uneasy feeling has gradually ripened since then into a widespread and deep-rooted conviction--not the least of the many deplorable results of a movement that claims to be called "national." It would be an evil day for the internal peace of India if a people still so proud of their history, so jealous of their religion, and so conscious of their virile superiority as the Mahomedans came to believe that they could only trust to their own right hand, and no longer to the authority and sense of justice of the British _Raj_, to avert the dangers which they foresee in the future from the establishment of an overt or covert Hindu ascendancy.

Some may say that it would be an equally evil day for the British _Raj_ if the Mahomedans came to believe in the futility of unrequited loyalty and joined hands with its enemies in the confident anticipation that, whatever welter might follow the collapse of British rule, they could not fail sooner or later to fight their way once more to the front.