re and more faint-hearted--to put it very
mildly--are his reprobations of violence.

The most threatening feature of the "Non-co-operation" movement, now
that it has failed so completely in its appeal to the better and more
educated classes, is that it is concentrating all its energies on the
ignorant and excitable masses. If one takes a long view of India's
progress under the new dispensation, it may well be a source of
satisfaction and encouragement that the insane lengths to which
"Non-co-operation" has gone have served at least to drive in a deep
wedge between the Moderates and the Extremists. But in the immediate
future "Non-co-operation" may prove not less but more formidable
because, except with a few eccentrics, it has lost whatever hold it may
have had for a time on the politically minded _intelligentsia_, and
feels, therefore, no longer under any restraint in addressing itself to
hungry appetites and primitive passions amongst the backward Hindu
masses as well as amongst Mahomedans. That it has not appealed to them
in vain there are increasingly ominous indications in such wanton
destruction as the firing of immense areas of forest in the Kumoon
district of the United Provinces. For the gods to be worshipped in fear
and trembling are the gods that revel in, and can only be placated by,
destruction. Wherever there are local discontents--and such there must
always be in a vast country and amongst vast populations that too often
have a hard struggle for bare existence--"Non-co-operation" is at once
on the spot to envenom the sores. Economic conditions aggravated by the
great rise in prices for all the necessaries of life since the Great War
press heavily on the most helpless classes. The vitality of the whole
population has been depressed for years past by the ravages of the
plague, now fortunately much abated, which have carried off about eight
million lives within the last two decades, and by the still more
appalling ravages of two epidemics of influenza which in 1918 within
one twelvemonth carried off some six or seven millions of lives, mostly
in their very best years, and left many more millions of lives either
older or younger wretchedly enfeebled. Add to all this the many direct
and indirect reactions of the general unrest which in so many different
forms has spread over the whole face of the globe, and of the particular
forms of political unrest which have kept India in periodical ferment
since 1905, cons