This, I say, is one way in which Mohammedan India may be taught to seek its salvation from accumulating evils. The other--and to my mind the far more hopeful way--it is in the power of our Government still to encourage them to choose. Three years ago I pointed out, in a book entitled “The Future of Islam,” the view which Indian Mohammedans took of her Majesty’s duties towards them in connection with her assumption of the Mogul title; and, while I was in India last winter, I had the satisfaction of finding my statement of their case fully accepted by those whom it most concerned. The Indian mulvis, Shiah as well as Sunni, held that her Majesty, in making herself Empress of India, had accepted a legal responsibility toward the Mohammedan community which involved a distinct obligation of protection in return for their loyalty, especially in such matters as the administration of their religious trusts, the furtherance of their education, and the arrangements connected with their pilgrimage; and they had even caused a translation of my statement to be published in Hindustani.
With regard to religious trusts, I found everywhere complaint of their being misapplied. It appears that at the time of the _resumptions_, many of these were confiscated on the arbitrary ground of defect in title, and others later on apparently no ground at all but public convenience. The locally notorious case of the Mohsin trust in Bengal has now been in part remedied, but it is worth quoting as a case which the Government has been forced to acknowledge, and it has been cited to me as an example of numerous cases less well known in which similar injustice still exists. In this, a large property was bequeathed by a rich Mohammedan explicitly for pious uses, yet for many years the income held in trust by the Government was devoted, not to any Mohammedan purpose at all, but to the education of Hindus. This, I say, has been acknowledged; but I have been repeatedly informed that sufficient property is still in Government hands to satisfy, if it were devoted to the uses originally intended, all the pressing needs of Mohammedan education; and I have the authority of Dr. Leitner, Principal of the Lahore Government College, for stating that in the Punjab alone _wakaf_ property to the value of many thousand pounds yearly is being officially misapplied.