-has been brought with
perhaps excessive uniformity within the scope of the new constitutional
reforms, many conditions in the Central Provinces and in the great
Presidency of Madras differ widely from those prevailing in the other
major provinces north of the Nerbudda, and the actual failure of
"Non-co-operation" to enforce its boycott of the elections was less
noteworthy than some other features in the new situation. In the Central
Provinces the elections themselves were fought out on much the same
lines as in the north and with very similar results, if allowance is
made for the intellectual backwardness of the province. Political
activity and agitation had been confined in the past mainly to Nagpur,
the capital, and to the western districts, in which a large Mahratta
element predominates especially amongst the better-educated classes.
Most of Mr. Tilak's former followers there had joined the
"Non-co-operation" movement, and their rigid abstention from the
elections left the doors of the Provincial Council wide open for the
representation of more sober Indian opinion. The Extremists showed their
contempt for the new assembly by putting up one or two "freak"
candidates in breach of the boycott they were preaching, and actually
got in a _dhobi_, or laundryman, at Jubbulpur. But the elections were
overshadowed by the preparations for the Nagpur Congress, which was to
be the great Gandhi counterblast to the Reforms, and the Extremists, who
poured into the province from the neighbouring Bombay Presidency,
concentrated their efforts on the creation of an atmosphere of general
unrest favourable to the new line of campaign upon which the rump of the
old Indian National Congress was about to enter with the open
renunciation of the fundamental article of its original creed--loyalty
to the British connection.

It seems one of the strangest of the many anomalies with which the
Indian situation teems that the Central Provinces should have been
chosen of all others as the scene for a great spectacular demonstration
of revolt against the state of "slavery" to which Indians have been
reduced by a "Satanic" alien rule. It is one of the precepts of Mr.
Gandhi's gospel of "Non-co-operation," though doubtless only as a
counsel of perfection, that Indian husbands and wives must cease to
bring "slave" children into the world until India has attained _Swaraj_.
Yet in the Central Provinces a larger proportion of Indian children than
in any