Government to acquiesce, lest he should be driven to override it by the exercise of the statutory powers vested in him.  He gave it to be understood that, if they became frequent, such conflicts of opinion between him and the Council would put an end to his usefulness either to the Government or to the Presidency, and he would feel justified in demanding his release from responsibilities he would no longer be able satisfactorily to discharge.  The Council was wise enough to take the hint and not to risk losing a Governor who had done so much to earn the confidence of Bengal, and by correcting an error of judgment, due chiefly to inexperience, it confirmed the victory which had been won over “Non-co-operation” at the polls.

Even in the storm-tossed Punjab the new Provincial Council made a better start than might have been expected from the temper of Lahore and the other large centres still brooding over the bitter memories of 1919.  In the Punjab and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, formerly itself part of the Punjab—­but excluded from the operation of the new Government of India Act and therefore lying outside this survey—­the Khilafat agitation has gone deeper than probably in any other part of India amongst large and very backward Mahomedan populations.  Yet upon the Punjab itself so cruel a lesson has not been lost as that taught to thousands of unfortunate Mahomedan peasants in the Frontier Province who were persuaded to give up their lands and trek into Afghanistan to seek the blessings of Mahomedan rule, and came back starved and plundered from their ill-starred exodus undertaken for the sake of Islam.  In Lahore and in the other chief urban constituencies “Non-co-operation,” with its usual methods of combined persuasion and intimidation, was so far successful that not 5 per cent of the electors went to the poll.  In some of the Mahomedan rural constituencies the attendances at the polls were, on the other hand, fairly large, especially in those where the influence of old conservative families was still paramount.  Altogether the Punjab Provincial Council is perhaps less representative of the whole electorate than in any other province in India.  Some official ingenuity had been displayed in grouping remote towns together without any regard for geography, in order to prevent townsmen undesirably addicted to advanced political views from standing as candidates for the rural constituencies in which many of the smaller towns would otherwise have been naturally merged.  This was a last effort based on the old belief that the population of the Punjab could be divided into goats and sheep, the goats being the “disloyal” townsmen and the sheep being the “loyal” peasantry.  There may have been substance in that belief before 1919, but how little there is in it now has been shown by the large majority who, in an assembly in which it is just the rural constituencies that are most effectively represented, passed a Resolution for the remission