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, constantly fed by violent speeches and by a still more violent vernacular press.  All these discontents “Non-co-operation” has set itself to link up to a common purpose by inflaming racial hatred, stirred as never since the Mutiny by the story, bad enough in itself and unscrupulously distorted and exaggerated, of the events in the Punjab which has been for two years the trump card of the Extremists, with an additional appeal to the religious fanaticism of the Mahomedans in the alleged wrong done to their faith by the Turkish peace terms.  Consciously and unconsciously Mr. Gandhi has lent his saintly countenance to all these menacing features of the “Non-co-operation” movement, and given them a religious sanction which captures many who would not have succumbed but for their faith in a Mahatma who can do and say no wrong.