History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

encies, but they mainly direct their efforts to promoting their own welfare, and seem to consider misfortunes outside their circle as being no affair of theirs, and as having no claim on their purses. Parsi benevolence has been exhibited in a truly catholic spirit, and scarcely any subscription list on a large scale or for an important object during the last fifty years has been without its one or more Parsi names upon it. The Parsis have therefore gained a prominent position in the world’s estimation by their commercial honesty and capacity, as well as by their widespread benevolence. As the total number of Parsis does not amount to 100,000 persons, it is evident that this reputation must have been obtained with difficulty, and, what is still more important, that it must have been thoroughly deserved.

No matters are of greater importance in connection with a community than its religious form and feeling, and the condition of education among the mass of the people. Into both of these subjects I have entered in considerable detail, treating the latter subject in the first volume, and the former in three separate chapters of the second. The question of education scarcely goes back farther than fifty years among the Parsis. Before that they were content with the merest rudiments of knowledge which were conveyed in Gujarati, the Hindu vernacular that they had adopted at the time of their first settlement in India.