One of the best results of British governance and of Western education has been to stimulate even amongst the “untouchables” a new sense of self-respect and self-reliance and a wholesome desire to emerge from the degradation to which the custom of centuries has condemned them.  It is amongst them that of late years Christian and even Mahomedan missionaries have found all over India their most fruitful field, and in some provinces mass-movements to Christianity have taken place, which are admittedly due in the first place to a desire for social emancipation, but will steadily lead, if properly handled, to moral and religious advancement.  One of the great problems now before the missionary societies of all Christian denominations is how these tens of thousands of converts can be taught and trained, and it is of great promise for the future that a Commission of Inquiry composed of British and American and Indian Christian missionaries has recently issued a report on Village Education in India which has approached this problem, amongst others, with a broad-minded appreciation of its economic and social as well as purely religious aspects.

Is it surprising that when the Indian National Congress, that has hitherto done nothing for them beyond embodying in its programme vague expressions of sympathy, is agitating for the severance of the British connection, and Extremist orators perambulate the country to preach a boycott of British officials, the Mahars should have sent in petitions imploring the Governor not to abandon them or surrender the power which has alone done something to raise them out of the slough of despond?  Mr. Gandhi, however, who would be a great social reformer had he not preferred to plunge into a dangerous political agitation, is not himself blind to such an awful blot as “untouchability” has made on Hindu civilisation, and some of his followers, prompted perhaps less than he is himself by a generous reforming spirit, have not been slow to see what abundant materials lie ready to their hand in these vast masses, profoundly ignorant and superstitious, if they can only be drawn into the turbid stream of “Non-co-operation” by some novel and ingenious appeal to their fears or to their appetites.

In the Madras Presidency, never swept to the same degree as Bengal or Bombay by the waves of political unrest, the electoral struggle assumed a form, peculiar to Southern Indian conditions, in which “Non-co-operation” entered very little.  For Southern India has its own life-history which differentiates it in many respects from other parts of India, and in none more so than in the survival of the Brahman’s ancient ascendancy, until recently almost unchallenged in this stronghold of Hinduism.