considering their relation to the future of eastern Europe and western Asia. We must not make the mistake, for instance, of testing the military strength and vitality of the Turkish empire by the efficacy of the government in times and for the purposes of peace.' Much of the recent discussion of the prospects of Russian and European intervention has been conducted in utter ignorance of the vast military resources furnished by the religious fanaticism of the Mohammedans of our day; and many persons evidently measure the possibilities of Turkish resistance by the standards of 1820 or 1854, in spite of the recent displays of unflinching courage and recklessness of death in the conflict with the Servians. We have no doubt as to the final victory of the Russians, if they decide to espouse the Servian cause; but it will not be the fruit of a single campaign, and it will be dearly purchased, both by themselves and by all the Christian populations in the rear of the Turkish armies.

In India the Wahabees have played a most curious part during the present century, and one of which we knew little or nothing until Mr. W. W. Hunter put us in possession of the strange facts disclosed by a series of trials for treason. It is true that the Indian branch of the sect is entirely unconscious of any affiliation with the Moslems of Nejed; that they have had as their founder a prophet or Imam of their own, for whose return to earth they look, and that Sayyid Ahmad reached independently some at least of the doctrinal conclusions which mark his resemblance to Abd-el-Wahab, and preached them for six years before he went on pilgrimage. During his visit to Meccah, which was in 1822, he aroused the suspicion and hostility of the Moslem doctors by the similarity of his teaching to that of the hated Wahabees, and was publicly degraded and expelled from the Holy City. This threw him into the arms of the party, and he returned to India by way of Nejed, with all his notions of reform made definite and explicit by the teachings of the Wahabee doctors. His earlier missionary labors had been in Bengal and its adjacent provinces, and he had already established a propaganda at Patna with four Kalifs (lieutenants) at its head. But he had rather denounced the abuses of Islam than proclaimed the duty of holy war to rescue India from its low estate as "the house of confusion.” He had initiated disciples and levied a tax upon them for the support of his mission; but he now began to enlist an army in the north

west provinces, and in 1824 he appeared in the mountains on the northern frontier of the Panjab, as the leader of a crescentade against the Sikhs. This jihad or war of zeal was proclaimed by his emissaries all over northern India. Up till 1830 his power as an insurgent leader grew steadily, and in that year he captured the Sikh capital Peshawar, and proclaimed himself the Khalif of Islam. But dissensions broke his power, and in the following year he was defeated in the mountains by a Sikh army and killed, after being constrained to evacuate the plains and abandon his conquests.

But although the movement met with a severe blow in his death, it still perpetuated itself, both as a wide-spread propaganda throughout northern India, and as a Moslem camp on the Panjab frontier. The Imam was not dead, said his lieutenants, but withdrawn from sight. The existence and character of the camp became well-known to the English government when their conquest of the Panjab made them heirs to all the troubles of the Sikh government. Between 1850 and 1863, it was necessary to send thirty-six expeditions against them. In 1863 and again in 1868, it was found necessary to dispatch a considerable force to break up their camp; and on each occasion the dangers of the expedition were great and its success only temporary. The camp still perpetuates itself, and in case of a war with the Afghans bids fair to become a source of trouble to the Indian Empire.

But not until 1863 had the English authorities any conception of the relation of the Patna propaganda to the frontier camp. In Patna its headquarters were a huge mass of buildings, which afforded space for seminaries and barracks; the more intelligent recruits were trained to serve as teachers and as tax-collectors; the rest were passed on by a sort of "underground railroad" to the Panjab frontier, after a course of teaching designed to inflame their zeal to the utmost. And the efforts of the organization were not confined to the revival of religion among the Mohammedans of India. They made conversions by wholesale, bringing in village after village, especially of the lower caste Hindoos, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by such a change of faith. Hence the curious change which has been going on in Bengal under the English rule, and which first came to light in the returns of the recent cenWhen the English entered Bengal, the Moslems were a ruling minority; but they are now greatly in the majority in this, the most densely-peopled province of India. Mohammedanism is spreading

sus.

as fast in India as in Central Africa, and with the same general result of converting villages of timid, slavish, superstitious people, into proud, self-respecting men. They have also effected a union with the Faraizees of Bengal, another class of Mohammedan zealots and Puritans, who reject all the unessential additions made to Islam by its orthodox corruptors. And every Wahabee conversion added to the number of fighters and tax-payers. To go on the jihad, or to contribute to its support, are the two great practical duties of the faith. He who cannot do the former must not neglect the latter. If it be but a handful of rice set apart at every meal-time from their scanty store, every family must contribute to the "war of zeal."

In 1858 the presence of Bengali faces among those who were killed in an expedition against the frontier camp was noticed with surprise, but the trace was not followed up until 1863, when a Panjabee Moslem, who had served in that expedition and was now a sergeant of police, detected four just such faces while on his morning rounds. He made advances to them, was taken into their confidence, and learned that they were Wahabee emissaries on their way back to Patna. He arrested them, but the English magistrate refused to commit them, as the Indian police have a loose way of making arrests for the purpose of extorting money.

The sergeant of police took the matter to heart; his family honor was at stake. He sent word to his son, who lived in a Northern Panjabee village, to make his way through the outposts of both forces to the Wahabee camp and enlist there, and not to return until he had learned the names of the traitors who were serving its cause within the English territory. This command to face a thousand dangers was implicitly obeyed; and his son, after serving for a time, deserted during one of the Wahabees' raids, "and presented himself one evening at his father's hut, many hundred miles inland, worn out by travel, want, and disease, but charged with the secret." The one clue led to others, and the heads of the Wahabee conspiracy were soon under arrest. The three chief of them were Ja'-far, a writer of pleas at Themeswar; Mohammed Shafee of Delhi, a contractor for supplies of butcher's meat for the Indian army; and Yahya Alee, the head of the propaganda at Patna. These with nine others, but of lesser note, were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death-a sentence commuted to transportation for life. But the conspiracy still lives, and new trials of traitors in Bengal, as

well as new campaigns in the Panjab, mark its vitality at both extremes of the Indian Empire. That a Moslem was the chief instrument in its detection, is not without significance. The better class, probably the great majority of the Indian Moslems, are not Wahabees. They cling tenaciously to usages sanctioned by the traditions. of centuries, and by the teaching of the great doctors, which the Wahabees denounce as apostasy. None the less, the Wahabee missionary speaks to them and to all Moslems from a great ground of advantage. He has the oldest traditions, the supreme authority, on his side. The law and the Prophet are with him. Hence his great success with the simpler and less sophisticated classes. Hence the ripples of agitation and discussion he has raised even among the learned respectables of Calcutta, whom he has driven to show reason how they can continue to be at once good Mohammedans and loyal subjects. Is not India "a house of confusion,"-a country

of Islam subdued by the Infidel, to the overthrow and destruction of the institutions and the law of Islam? And, according to all doctors of the law, when a true believer finds himself in such a country, he is tied down to the alternative of jihad or hejira, war or flight. To settle this issue, the Mohammedans of Calcutta submitted the question to the heads of the three great sects at Meccah—where the Hanbalees, however, are not represented and from each of the three obtained a decision against the Wahabees. India, they agree, is still Dar-ul-Islam, a country of the faith; but whether this leaves room for the obligation to go on the jihad because it is oppressed by the unbeliever, or whether the protection given to Moslem usages, even in the absence of a Mohammedan code and judges, does not render loyalty to the Queen lawful.

That Wahabeeism has not been suppressed by these prosecutions and others which have followed it, might have been expected. It is spreading over all the north of India stealthily and steadily, and may any day break out in a rebellion hardly less fierce than that of 1857. But even the fiercest fanaticism is not invincible, as has been seen in Ibrahim's conquest of Nejed, and in the final overthrow of the Murid revival.

ROBT. ELLIS THOMPSON.

T1

BASILISKS PHYSICAL AND MORAL.

HE basilisk was a fabulous creature of antiquity, a serpent or

lizard of an indefinite construction, whose habits and ways are not generally known, but which had the power of charming its victims to destruction by the wonderful influence of its eye.

The Egyptian symbolism of snake worship, the far-off story of the serpent in Eden, the scriptural prophecy of enmity between the serpent's head and humanity's heel, and the fulfilled realization of this antagonism in man's instinctive hatred of the serpent tribe, have all given to this subject its full share of wonder and curiosity.

Even the Psalmist, in describing the wicked, says, "they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, which will not hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely."

This basilisk-eye, be it in serpent or cockatrice, or dragon or lizard, fastened itself upon its victim, and compelled it to rush to its own destruction, or to be powerless in the presence of its captor. It destroyed the true will and substituted a false one, and thus was all-powerful in its command over the enslaved creature before it.

This will do for basilisks in general. We have nailed our legendary figure-head to the subject before us. Let us come to a very curious study of Human Nature-physical as well as moral.

The poet Ovid, from Heathenism, and the Apostle Paul, from Christianity, alike describe this other false will of man.

Ovid says in his Metamorphoses, "Video melior proboque, deteriora sequor," a passage singularly like St. Paul's expression, "What I would I do not, but what I hate that I do."

Sometimes we can understand the reason for this false and ruinous will.

When Ginx's baby, a grown-up man of five-and-thirty, throws himself over London Bridge on the very spot where his father, just twenty-five years before, wanted to make way with him, we can understand and see the impelling cause. When Tom Hood's

"One more unfortunate,
Weary of breath ”—

does the same thing, we know well enough the reasons of shame which took command of the poor shipwrecked nature.

So too when the cold and frozen traveler gives way to the sleepi