to the vast majority of voters what the vote meant, why they ought to use it, and how they had to record it.  At many polling stations ballot-boxes were provided of different colours or showing different symbols—­a horse, a flag, a cart, a lion, etc.—­adopted by candidates to enable the voter who could not read their names to drop his ballot ticket into the right box without asking questions apt to jeopardise the secrecy of the ballot.

Many voters instinctively distrusted the privilege suddenly thrust on them, and scented in it some trap laid by Government, perhaps for extracting fresh taxation, or worse.  Many more remained wholly indifferent and saw no reason for putting themselves to the slightest trouble in a matter with which they could not see that they had any personal concern.  Except in large centres, the candidates themselves often did very little to disarm distrust or to combat indifference.  There was little or no electioneering of the kind with which we are familiar; and when once “Non-co-operation” led to the withdrawal of Extremist candidates, there was generally no serious line of political cleavage between the others, who, especially in the rural districts, where their neighbours already knew all about them, were content to rely on their local influence and personal reputation to carry them through.

The battle, in fact, was not fought out chiefly at the polls.  It was waged very fiercely in the press and on the platform between those who were bent on paralysing the reforms as the malevolent conception of a “Satanic” Government and those who were determined to bring them to fruition, not indeed in blind support of Government, but as a means of exercising constitutional pressure on the Government.  Mr. Gandhi certainly succeeded not only in dissuading his immediate followers but in frightening a good many respectable citizens who have no heart for militant politics from coming forward as candidates.  Could he have made “Non-co-operation” universally effective, there would have been no candidates and no nominations, no elections and no councils.  But in this he failed, as some of the more worldly Extremists foresaw who obeyed him in this matter with reluctance.  In the Bombay Presidency, Gokhale, though dead, had a large share in the victory of the old principles for which he had stood when there had been little will to co-operate on the part either of Government or of the majority of Western-educated Indians.  For none fought the battle of the Moderates more steadfastly and faced the rowdiness of the “Non-co-operationists” more fearlessly than Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, who had succeeded him as the head of his “Servants of India” Society, and Professor Paranjpe, who had long been closely associated with him in educational work at the Ferguson College in Poona.  Enough Moderates were found to stick to their colours in practically every constituency, and they secured their seats, in the absence of Extremist nominations, without contest, or after submitting their not very acute political differences to the arbitrament of the polls.