preside over the
"transferred" departments. This is the most startling transformation
scene which any of the Provincial elections has produced. The
non-Brahmans have got the chance which they have long claimed. If they
rise to the occasion, deal with the Brahmans more fairly than the latter
dealt with them, and, remembering the struggle they have had for their
own emancipation, help the "untouchables" to rise in their turn out of
the state of degradation to which centuries of Brahman domination have
condemned them, the reforms may prove to have been perhaps as important
a landmark in the moral regeneration of Hindu society as in the
development of the Indian body politic. For, though it would be unfair
to forget that the rigidity of the great caste system probably alone
saved Hindu society from complete disintegration during centuries of
internal anarchy and foreign invasions, its survival would be fatal now
to the advancement of India on new lines of democratic progress. In any
case the triumph of the non-Brahmans is an unmistakable blow to
"Non-co-operation." Their one grievance against British rule has
hitherto been that it tolerated Brahman ascendancy and refused to
co-operate with them in their passionate struggle against it. But now
there is nothing to damp their zeal or deter them from co-operating with
Government in securing the permanent success of the reforms to which, as
they have to admit in spite of their former suspicions, they owe a
measure of political advancement that far exceeds all their
anticipations.

In Southern as well as in Northern India the failure of the
Non-co-operationists' frontal attack on the reforms was beyond dispute.
They were resolved to kill them in the womb by laying an interdict upon
the elections to the new popular assemblies. No candidate, Mr. Gandhi
had pronounced, was to enter for election, no elector was to record his
vote. At a moment when the elections were already in progress and should
have at least tempered his optimism, he himself assured me that the
results as a whole would yet afford a most splendid demonstration of the
stern temper of the people that would never trust and would never accept
the mockery of reforms proceeding from a "Satanic" Government. He was
deaf to my suggestion that, even if the temper of the Indian people was
such as he believed it to be, it would have been demonstrated in a
manner far more intelligible to the political mind of the West had his