ovince, but generally speaking was
based on a property qualification measured by payment of land revenue or
of income-tax or of municipal rates. Military service counted as a
special qualification. Under these regulations about 6,200,000 electors
were registered, or nearly 2-3/4 per cent of the total population
throughout India under direct British administration, excluding the
areas to which the Act of 1919 was not to apply.

The regulations, however, merely supplied the rough framework; the task
of compiling the lists of qualified electors devolved upon the
Government officers and special election commissions appointed _ad hoc_
throughout the country, and to the much-abused Civil Service mainly
belongs the credit of having made it possible to hold the elections
within less than a year of the passing of the Act. In the Bombay
Presidency, for instance, where I had my first opportunity of seeing the
new electoral system at work, the electoral rolls finally included some
550,000 electors out of a population of about 20,000,000 of widely
different races and creeds, speaking three absolutely different
languages. Even more laborious than the compiling of voters' lists was
the task of explaining to the vast majority of voters what the vote
meant, why they ought to use it, and how they had to record it. At many
polling stations ballot-boxes were provided of different colours or
showing different symbols--a horse, a flag, a cart, a lion,
etc.--adopted by candidates to enable the voter who could not read their
names to drop his ballot ticket into the right box without asking
questions apt to jeopardise the secrecy of the ballot.

Many voters instinctively distrusted the privilege suddenly thrust on
them, and scented in it some trap laid by Government, perhaps for
extracting fresh taxation, or worse. Many more remained wholly
indifferent and saw no reason for putting themselves to the slightest
trouble in a matter with which they could not see that they had any
personal concern. Except in large centres, the candidates themselves
often did very little to disarm distrust or to combat indifference.
There was little or no electioneering of the kind with which we are
familiar; and when once "Non-co-operation" led to the withdrawal of
Extremist candidates, there was generally no serious line of political
cleavage between the others, who, especially in the rural districts,
where their neighbours already knew all about them, were conten