perhaps amongst the Extremists during the Anti-Partition campaign was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, who, like Mr. Gandhi, had studied in England and with great distinction.  Though, unlike Mr. Gandhi, he never indulged in wholesale denunciations of Western civilisation, his newspaper, the Yugantar, was a daily trumpet-call to revolt against British rule, and he himself narrowly escaped conviction on a charge of bomb-making.  Yet as far back as 1910, from his place of retirement in Pondicherry, he issued after the Morley-Minto reforms had been promulgated a significant message to his fellow-countrymen advising them to accept partial Swaraj as a means to ensure complete Swaraj, and amongst the literature that helped to defeat “Non-co-operation” in Bengal, one of the most striking pamphlets was one entitled “Gandhi or Arabindo?” in which a very fervent disciple and collaborator of the latter in the most fiery days of the Yugantar argued with great force the case for co-operation with Government against “Non-co-operation” as now preached by Mr. Gandhi.  Only less remarkable has been the conversion of many other old Bengalee leaders, including the veteran Sir Surendranath Banerjee, who never, however, went quite to the same lengths of extremism.

During the electoral campaign Mr. Gandhi could still find large audiences, not all consisting of excitable students, to acclaim him or to listen open-mouthed to his ceaseless flow of eloquence.  But the electors went to the polls and voted for the candidates against whom he and his followers had fulminated, and, in the rural districts especially, election meetings often refused to listen to any elaborate political dissertations, and wanted only to hear what the candidates were prepared to do for elementary education, sanitation, schools, roads, etc.  So the Bengal elections too resulted in the return, often by relatively large bodies of voters, of members pledged and competent to co-operate with Government.  The Khilafat agitation, accompanied in Bengal as everywhere else by aggressive religious intimidation, affected the polling in some of the Mahomedan constituencies.  But during the Anti-Partition campaign Mahomedans and Hindus had been in opposite camps, whereas Mr. Gandhi was now making a strong and to some extent successful bid for Mahomedan support by endorsing the Mahomedan grievance.  So the Mahomedan change of front merely emphasised “Non-co-operation’s” defeat in Bengal.

Equally hopeful were the signs of a better understanding and of the revival of a spirit of friendly co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in Calcutta, hitherto regarded, not quite without reason, as a stronghold of reactionary European conservatism, especially amongst the non-official community.  It can hardly be denied that, except where official relations brought them into contact—­and not always there—­Europeans and Indians have lived too much in separate water-tight compartments until each has ceased to see anything