influence in the State, and are already demanding a reservation of “communal” seats for their own caste in future.  Lord Willingdon, as a constitutional Governor, chose from the non-Brahman majority in the Council all the three Indian Ministers who form part of the new Provincial Government and preside over the “transferred” departments.  This is the most startling transformation scene which any of the Provincial elections has produced.  The non-Brahmans have got the chance which they have long claimed.  If they rise to the occasion, deal with the Brahmans more fairly than the latter dealt with them, and, remembering the struggle they have had for their own emancipation, help the “untouchables” to rise in their turn out of the state of degradation to which centuries of Brahman domination have condemned them, the reforms may prove to have been perhaps as important a landmark in the moral regeneration of Hindu society as in the development of the Indian body politic.  For, though it would be unfair to forget that the rigidity of the great caste system probably alone saved Hindu society from complete disintegration during centuries of internal anarchy and foreign invasions, its survival would be fatal now to the advancement of India on new lines of democratic progress.  In any case the triumph of the non-Brahmans is an unmistakable blow to “Non-co-operation.”  Their one grievance against British rule has hitherto been that it tolerated Brahman ascendancy and refused to co-operate with them in their passionate struggle against it.  But now there is nothing to damp their zeal or deter them from co-operating with Government in securing the permanent success of the reforms to which, as they have to admit in spite of their former suspicions, they owe a measure of political advancement that far exceeds all their anticipations.

In Southern as well as in Northern India the failure of the Non-co-operationists’ frontal attack on the reforms was beyond dispute.  They were resolved to kill them in the womb by laying an interdict upon the elections to the new popular assemblies.  No candidate, Mr. Gandhi had pronounced, was to enter for election, no elector was to record his vote.  At a moment when the elections were already in progress and should have at least tempered his optimism, he himself assured me that the results as a whole would yet afford a most splendid demonstration of the stern temper of the people that would never trust and would never accept the mockery of reforms proceeding from a “Satanic” Government.  He was deaf to my suggestion that, even if the temper of the Indian people was such as he believed it to be, it would have been demonstrated in a manner far more intelligible to the political mind of the West had his followers taken part in the elections, and, after sweeping the board in accordance with his anticipations, had then placed their demands, whatever they might be, on record before the world, declaring at the same time that,