NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE revolt of the Mad Moollah, and his incursion upon the route to Chitral, reported this week from India, may prove of no more importance than a riot, and may also prove a grave event. He has no tribal authority whatever, but he gathers fanatics by the hundred, and his idea is clearly to attack local chiefs who will not join him. That would not matter if the chiefs would resist him with a will, but their men, for religions reasons, do not quite like the work; they give way, we suspect, very readily, and every success swells the numbers of the Moollah's followers, who now, it is said, amount to seven thousand men. The Government is therefore right in sending two regular brigades to check the movement at its outset by strengthening the Nawab of Dir. They will probably give a good account of the Moollah, but if they are defeated, which is possible though not probable, we have a bad affair upon our hands, a leader wholly reckless of lives, throwing men, who are all Ghazees, not upon us at first, but on our frontier allies. Any kind of " army," if successful, in India gathers like a snowball.
