been for
years conspicuous for political disaffection, it should have rallied so
generally in support of the reforms shows how great is the change they
have wrought amongst the Western-educated classes. Nowhere in the United
Provinces was the electoral battle so fierce as in the town of Jhansi,
where Mr. Chintamani, once the irreconcilable editor of the Allahabad
_Leader_, came out at the head of a large poll, though in order to
defeat him the "Non-co-operationists" sacrificed their principles and
put up and supported with their own votes an obscure candidate by whose
election they hoped to bring the new Council into contempt.

The outstanding feature of the elections in Bengal was the striking
evidence afforded of a return to political sanity in a province which, a
dozen years ago, was the chief political storm-centre in India. Many of
the same leaders who, formerly, at least dallied with lawlessness during
the violent agitation that followed the Partition of Bengal now came
forward openly as champions of constitutional progress on the lines of
the new reforms and as candidates for the new Councils. They knew what
all their own attempts to make a _Swadeshi_ boycott really effective by
developing "national" industries and substituting "national" products
and "national" trade agencies for foreign ones had ended in. They
remembered the failure of the "national" schools and colleges which were
to have supplanted Government schools and colleges. They realised that a
dangerous propaganda which had involved hundreds of immature youths in a
network of criminal conspiracies had tended to the subversion of every
principle of authority, at the expense of the parent at least as much as
of good government and public peace. When the famous Pronouncement of
August 20, 1917, opened up for India the prospect of ultimate
self-government within the Empire, and the recommendations of the
Montagu-Chelmsford Report finally took shape in a new Government of
India Act, there was found a solid body of public opinion in Bengal
which had been taught by actual and very costly experience not to throw
away the substance for the shadow. The most influential 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