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 172 PROVINCIAL DYNASTIES and strongholds easily regained; but there was clearly no advance in public security or in the supremacy of the central government. The inevitable Jaw of nature had, no doubt, been asserting itself anew in the ready recovery of the free Hindu tribes as against the effete dominancy of the domesticated Moslems; but this pro- cess had been in continuous action from the day when the thin wedge of Mohammedanism first thrust itself amid the overwhelming population of India, whose al- most Chinese attachment to ancient ideas would have resisted far more persuasive arguments than the sharp- est edge of a scimitar or the most eloquent exhortations of the latest inspired preacher of Islam. Added to this normally antagonistic element there had intervened in higher quarters an amalgamative process of inter- marriage with Hindu females and an admission of Hindu converts upon very easy terms to all the hon- ours of Mohammedan nobility; so that any prestige the conquering race might once have claimed was alto- gether subdued if not degraded by these inconsistent concessions; and it required something more revolution- ary than the accession of a local sayyid to perpetuate a new dynasty." The murder of Khizr's successor, Mubarak Shah, by his vizir, followed by the despatch of that minister whilst he was attempting to assassinate the next Sultan, led to worse anarchy and paved the way for the accession, in 1451, of the Afghan Buhlol Lodi and a new line, whose rule for a time restored somewhat of the faded splendour of Delhi. The rest of India was split up into numerous inde-