Nowhere had the Extremists developed their plan of campaign on more comprehensive lines than in those great United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, which with their huge and dense population of over forty-eight millions under one provincial government form the largest and in some respects the most important administrative unit in British India.  It was within the area which it now covers that the Mutiny broke out and, with the exception of Delhi itself, was mainly confined and fought out.  The bitter memories of that period have not yet wholly vanished.  It contains a larger proportion than any other province of historic cities—­Agra, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Muttra, Jhansi, Benares, Allahabad, some of them still the nerve centres of Hinduism and of Islam.  The Mahomedans form only a minority of about one-sixth of the population, but their influence must not be measured merely by numbers, for one of the distinctive features of the United Provinces is the survival of a great landed aristocracy in which the Mahomedans are largely represented.  Nowhere else, indeed, is the land still held in such an overwhelming proportion by great landlords, or the rights of the humble tillers of the soil more precarious.

The Extremists were quick to exploit the various fields of agitation which those peculiar conditions provide.  They even launched the forces of “Non-co-operation” against the two Indian universities only founded within the last few years, in deference to the demands of the Indians themselves, on frankly denominational lines, in derogation of the very principle of undenominational education that we had upheld in all other Indian universities.  It is one of the many strange anomalies of Gandhiism that it should have elected to concentrate its wrecking policy on the very universities in which Islam and Hinduism respectively have been conceded a closer preserve than anywhere else for the training of Indian youths in the spirit of the two great national religions of India.  The joint efforts of the Hindu saint and of his chief Mahomedan henchmen, the brothers Ali, failed to take either the Hindu or the Mahomedan stronghold by storm.  Mr. Gandhi, indeed, showed some reluctance to press his attack upon the Hindu university at Benares with anything like the same vigour with which he backed up Mahomed and Shaukat Ali’s raid on the Mahomedan university at Aligurh, and from so marked a contrast many Mahomedans might have been expected to draw very obvious conclusions.

More insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, was the organised attempt of the Extremists to get hold of the agricultural masses through the widespread discontent, by no means of recent date, due to the peculiar conditions of land tenure in these provinces.  In an essentially agricultural country such as India still is, and must probably always remain, agrarian questions are amongst the most difficult and complicated with which British rule has had to deal.  For they present themselves