olest season of the year in Upper India falls on the open country when
the sun pours down out of the cloudless sky. Here at a roadside shrine a
group of brightly dressed village women were trying to attract the
attention of a favourite god by ringing the little temple bell. There
some brown-skinned youngsters were driving their flock of goats and
sheep into the leafy shelter of the trees. But the fields, now bare of
crops, were lifeless, and the scattered hamlets mostly fast asleep.
About fifteen miles out we reached the big village of Soraon--almost a
small township--in which there seemed equally little to suggest that
this was the red-letter day in the history of modern India that was to
initiate her people into the great art of self-government. Still the
small court-house, we found, had been swept and garnished for use as a
polling station. Two small groups of people stood listlessly outside the
building, the candidates' agents on the one side of the entrance, and on
the other the _patwaris_--the village scribes who keep the official land
records--brought in from the different villages to attest the signatures
and thumbmarks of the voters. Inside, the presiding officer with his
assistants sat at his table with the freshly printed electoral roll in
front of him and the voting paper to be handed to each voter as he
passed into the inner sanctuary in which the ballot-boxes awaited him.
But voters there were none. From eight in the morning till past twelve
not a single voter had presented himself out of over 1200 assigned to
this polling station, nor did a single one present himself in the course
of the whole day.

Nowhere else, however, was the boycott so effective, and throughout the
province a full third of the qualified electors recorded their
votes--not a bad percentage under such novel conditions and in the face
of such a determined effort to wreck the elections. The land-owning
class secured the representation to which its hereditary influence
unquestionably entitles it, but it has held so much aloof from modern
education that with some notable exceptions it contributes numbers
rather than capacity to the Council. With forty-four members belonging
to the legal profession out of a total of one hundred members this
Provincial Council, like most others, is doubtless somewhat overstocked
with lawyers. But upon no other profession has Mr. Gandhi urged more
strongly the duty of "Non-co-operation," and that, after having