Of those responsibilities none was more fully realized than that of showing their loyalty to the British _Raj_--a loyalty all the more unalterable in that it was based upon their growing conviction that the maintenance of the British _Raj_ was essential to the welfare, and even to the existence, of the Mahomedans of India.
As I write I have before me a letter from another Mahomedan friend, a man both of European education and very wide knowledge of his Indian co-religionists, with whom he enjoys exceptional credit.

I was so much impressed with the prevalence of this form of fatalism that I wrote and asked him for his opinion.

This is his answer:-- Moslems feel that while at present the Government in India is British in spirit as well as in name, there are already indications that it might gradually become Hindu in fact, though the British form might remain.

The whole object of the advanced Congress Party and of the leaders of the Nationalist movement is not the overthrow of British rule in name, but in fact.

You may say that this is a wild apprehension, and that the Government is not foolish enough or weak enough to degenerate into a mere form.