-Agra,
Lucknow, Cawnpore, Muttra, Jhansi, Benares, Allahabad, some of them
still the nerve centres of Hinduism and of Islam. The Mahomedans form
only a minority of about one-sixth of the population, but their
influence must not be measured merely by numbers, for one of the
distinctive features of the United Provinces is the survival of a great
landed aristocracy in which the Mahomedans are largely represented.
Nowhere else, indeed, is the land still held in such an overwhelming
proportion by great landlords, or the rights of the humble tillers of
the soil more precarious.

The Extremists were quick to exploit the various fields of agitation
which those peculiar conditions provide. They even launched the forces
of "Non-co-operation" against the two Indian universities only founded
within the last few years, in deference to the demands of the Indians
themselves, on frankly denominational lines, in derogation of the very
principle of undenominational education that we had upheld in all other
Indian universities. It is one of the many strange anomalies of
Gandhiism that it should have elected to concentrate its wrecking policy
on the very universities in which Islam and Hinduism respectively have
been conceded a closer preserve than anywhere else for the training of
Indian youths in the spirit of the two great national religions of
India. The joint efforts of the Hindu saint and of his chief Mahomedan
henchmen, the brothers Ali, failed to take either the Hindu or the
Mahomedan stronghold by storm. Mr. Gandhi, indeed, showed some
reluctance to press his attack upon the Hindu university at Benares with
anything like the same vigour with which he backed up Mahomed and
Shaukat Ali's raid on the Mahomedan university at Aligurh, and from so
marked a contrast many Mahomedans might have been expected to draw very
obvious conclusions.

More insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, was the organised attempt of
the Extremists to get hold of the agricultural masses through the
widespread discontent, by no means of recent date, due to the peculiar
conditions of land tenure in these provinces. In an essentially
agricultural country such as India still is, and must probably always
remain, agrarian questions are amongst the most difficult and
complicated with which British rule has had to deal. For they present
themselves in the different provinces in forms as diverse as the past
history and local conditions of each province, long before i