Nowhere else, however, was the boycott so effective, and throughout the province a full third of the qualified electors recorded their votes—­not a bad percentage under such novel conditions and in the face of such a determined effort to wreck the elections.  The land-owning class secured the representation to which its hereditary influence unquestionably entitles it, but it has held so much aloof from modern education that with some notable exceptions it contributes numbers rather than capacity to the Council.  With forty-four members belonging to the legal profession out of a total of one hundred members this Provincial Council, like most others, is doubtless somewhat overstocked with lawyers.  But upon no other profession has Mr. Gandhi urged more strongly the duty of “Non-co-operation,” and that, after having been for years conspicuous for political disaffection, it should have rallied so generally in support of the reforms shows how great is the change they have wrought amongst the Western-educated classes.  Nowhere in the United Provinces was the electoral battle so fierce as in the town of Jhansi, where Mr. Chintamani, once the irreconcilable editor of the Allahabad Leader, came out at the head of a large poll, though in order to defeat him the “Non-co-operationists” sacrificed their principles and put up and supported with their own votes an obscure candidate by whose election they hoped to bring the new Council into contempt.

The outstanding feature of the elections in Bengal was the striking evidence afforded of a return to political sanity in a province which, a dozen years ago, was the chief political storm-centre in India.  Many of the same leaders who, formerly, at least dallied with lawlessness during the violent agitation that followed the Partition of Bengal now came forward openly as champions of constitutional progress on the lines of the new reforms and as candidates for the new Councils.  They knew what all their own attempts to make a Swadeshi boycott really effective by developing “national” industries and substituting “national” products and “national” trade agencies for foreign ones had ended in.  They remembered the failure of the “national” schools and colleges which were to have supplanted Government schools and colleges.  They realised that a dangerous propaganda which had involved hundreds of immature youths in a network of criminal conspiracies had tended to the subversion of every principle of authority, at the expense of the parent at least as much as of good government and public peace.  When the famous Pronouncement of August 20, 1917, opened up for India the prospect of ultimate self-government within the Empire, and the recommendations of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report finally took shape in a new Government of India Act, there was found a solid body of public opinion in Bengal which had been taught by actual and very costly experience not to throw away the substance for the shadow.  The most influential