in the governance of the country to
Indian shoulders, it could afford to indulge in wholesale criticism of
Government finance and to propose sweeping changes without stopping to
consider ways and means or to weigh the ultimate effects upon the
revenue of the State, and it was easy for it to court popularity by
inveighing against the land tax and advocating the extension of the
"permanent settlement" to the whole of India as a sovereign panacea. But
sober Indian politicians have begun to look farther ahead and to reckon
with the costs of the many popular reforms which Indian Ministers will
be expected to carry through in the new Councils. Mr. Gandhi and his
followers, who are determined if possible to wreck them, are deterred by
no such considerations, and the non-payment of the land tax, which must
remain the backbone of Indian revenue, already figures in their
programme of "Non-co-operation," of which the avowed object is to
paralyse Government and render British rule impossible without any
resort to the methods of violence they profess to deprecate. It can
hardly fail to prove a fairly popular cry, for there is no more
unpalatable form of co-operation with Government all the world over than
the payment of taxes, and the Extremists combine this part of their
propaganda with more specialised efforts to capture the confidence of
the particular classes amongst the peasantry who have rent and tenure
grievances by warmly espousing their cause against the landlords and
inciting them to organised resistance. They not only stimulate thereby
a general feeling of unrest and discontent, but they actually carry the
war to the very doors of the great land-owning class which has hitherto
been least accessible to revolutionary influences.

This was one of the special features of the "Non-co-operation" campaign
in the United Provinces, and Mr. Gandhi himself arrived on the scene to
lend it the full weight of his personal influence on the very eve of the
elections. How extraordinary is the influence of his mesmeric
personality and style of oratory I realised when I drove out on the day
of the elections into a district outside Allahabad where he had himself
addressed on the previous afternoon a vast crowd of twenty thousand
peasants. It was about noon, and only a few creaking bullock-carts and
"the footfall mute of the slow camel"--neither of them suggestive of a
hotly contested election--disturbed the drowsy peace which even in the
co