“_1st March._--We left India to-day, being exactly the anniversary of our leaving Egypt two years ago, and we are going home with something of the same vague hopes and fears. We have only taken our tickets to Suez, but I do not mean to land there, as it would only give them a triumph to have me arrested, and I can strike them a severer blow by moderation.
“As we were leaving Government House, Professor Monier Williams and his wife arrived. I had some talk with him about the things that interest me, and he invited me to come and stay with him at Oxford, and give a lecture on Mohammedan education. This I promised to do.
“And so we leave India, well satisfied with what we have done, but not a little glad now it is over.”
Such was my Indian tour of 1883-1884. It will be rightly asked by those who have read thus far how it came about that I wasted so great an opportunity for good as then seemed open to me, and did not return the following year, or indeed in any subsequent year, to carry out the mission which appeared marked out for me. I often ask myself the same question. Looking back at the position I held for a moment with Hindus, Mohammedans, and Parsis alike, I am filled with regret that in the sequel I should have put it to so little purpose. If I had had the perseverance to pursue the course I had begun, and had followed it out unflinchingly to its full results, I believe that I might have brought about great permanent good for the people whose interests I had espoused, and perhaps with the Mohammedans encouraged them to a real reformation, social and intellectual, if not political. To do this, however, it would have been necessary for me to devote the whole of my life to this special work, and to give up every other interest which I had at heart and all my private affairs at home. It would have required something more than sympathy to bring me to the point; and I suppose my mind lacked the impetus of a full faith, without which complete devotion to a cause more than half religious could not be.
Nevertheless I left Bombay with an entire intention of returning the following winter, and of making a new tour for the collection of the funds necessary for the proposed Mohammedan University. I had already received promises of over £20,000, the greater part being the intended gift of my friend the Rajah Amir Hassan, of Lucknow; and, with the patronage of the Nizam and Lord Ripon’s approval, the accomplishment of at least this part of my plans seemed already within my reach. If it was frustrated, the fault, though partly mine, was not wholly so. A series of misfortunes happened in the course of the year which combined to defeat it, and which nothing but very persistent determination on my part could have sufficed to overcome.