But throughout the war India not only remained calm and restrained, but her actual contribution to the war, in men and material, was colossal and was ungrudgingly given.  She had a right to expect in return generous treatment; but what did she get?  She got the Rowlatt Bill.  Now, of course, there was a great deal of wicked, lying nonsense talked by agitators about the provisions of the Rowlatt Bill, and the people were grossly misled.  But the plain fact remains that when India had emerged from the trying ordeal of the war, not only with honour untarnished, but having placed us under a great obligation, our first practical return was to pass a repressive measure, for fear, forsooth, that if it was not passed then it might be pigeon-holed and forgotten.  India asked for bread and we gave her a stone—­a stupid, blundering act, openly deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India.  What was the result?  The Punjab disturbances and the preventive massacre of the Jallianwala Bagh.  I do not propose to dwell on this deplorable and sadly mishandled matter, save to say that so far from cowing agitation, it has left a legacy of hate that it will take years to wipe out; and that the subsequent action of a number of ill-informed persons in raising a very large sum of money for the officer responsible for that massacre has further estranged Indians and emphasised in their eyes the brand of their subjection.

THE RISE OF GHANDI

To India, thus seething with bitterness over the Punjab disturbances, there was added the Moslem resentment over the fate of Turkey.  I was myself in London and Paris in a humble capacity at the Peace Conference, and I know that our leading statesmen were fully informed of the Moslem attitude and the dangers of unsympathetic and dilatory action in this matter.  But an arrogant diplomacy swept all warnings aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey.  What was the result?  Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India.  Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, entente between the two great rival creeds.

It was in this electric atmosphere that Ghandi, emerging from his ascetic retirement, found himself an unchallenged leader.  Short of stature, frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had none of the outward appearance of dominance.  His appeal lay in the simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in the East.  But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail.  The Hijrat movement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes; his attack on Government educational establishments brought disaster to many youthful careers; non-co-operation fizzled