special favor and reward they asserted awaited them in Paradise for blasphemous cruelties like these! The reference in the lines is to their habit of engraving texts from the Koran upon their swords. What millions, during the past eight centuries, have been destroyed by Mohammedanism and Romanism in the name of religion, till humanity sighs to be relieved of their baneful presence, and the true Christian looks forward solemnly to the awful hour when He “to whom vengeance belongeth” will call “the beast and the false prophet” to their dread account—partners in punishment as they have been in guilt!
The character and cruelties of Popery recorded in Motley's recent histories are equaled in India's records by those Moslem scourges, Hyder Ali, Tippoo, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, and Aurungzebe. The creed of the Koran is utterly unfit for civil government. It is a system of moral and political bondage, sustained only by military power and despotic rule, naturally corrupting those who administer it, while it has ever pauperized and demoralized the people who have been subjected to its sway. The Moguls have done in India what the Turks have accomplished in Asia Minor; and yet, while destroying and impoverishing, neither race have taken root in either land. In the former the power of the Moguls crumbled to pieces, and in the latter that of the Turks is now “ready to vanish away.”
The last century closed upon Shah Alum—the grandfather of the monarch whose portrait we here present—engaged in a terrible struggle with the Rohillas of the North and the Mahrattas of the South. The long examples of perfidy and blood were then bearing their fruit, and had made these once subject-races the remorseless and inveterate enemies of the Mogul rule. Their power had been rising as that of the Emperor was in its decadence. Destitute of the means, which were once so abundant, to repress these conflicts, the aged Emperor had to witness these fierce and powerful parties contending with each other for the possession of his person and his capital, and the power to rule in his name.
In 1785, Sindia, the Mahratta, became paramount; but a few years after, while engaged in a war with Pertalo Sing, of Jeypoor,
