The Delhi _Hartal_ brought for the first time into full relief the close alliance into which the Mahomedan Extremists had been brought with the Hindu Extremists, as well as the influence which both had acquired over a considerable section of the lower classes in the two communities. The political leaders had fallen into line in the Indian National Congress and the All-India Moslem League during the 1916 and 1917 sessions, when they united in demanding Home Rule for India, and they had united since then in rejecting as totally inadequate the scheme of reforms foreshadowed in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. But not till towards the conclusion of the war did the Mahomedan Extremists discover a special grievance for their own community in the peace terms likely to be imposed upon a beaten Turkey. That was a grievance far more likely to appeal to their co-religionists than the political grievances which had formed the stock-in-trade of Hindu Extremism, if they could be worked upon to believe that Great Britain and her allies were plotting not merely against the temporal power of the Ottoman Empire, but against the Mahomedan religion all over the world by depriving the Sultan of Turkey of the authority essential to the discharge of his office as Khalif or spiritual head of Islam. The agitation was at first very artificial, for the bulk of Indian Mahomedans had until recent years known very little about and taken still less interest in Turkey, and their loyalty had never wavered during the war. Some of the leading Indian Mahomedans had indeed openly disputed Sultan Abdul Hamid's claim to the Khalifate of Islam when he first tried at the end of the last century to import his Pan-Islamic propaganda into India. But the long delay on the part of the Allies in formulating their Turkish peace terms allowed time for the movement to grow and to carry with it the more fanatical element amongst Indian Mahomedans. The Government of India tried in vain to allay Mahomedan feeling by receiving deputations from the _Khilafat_ Association founded to prosecute an intensified campaign in favour of Turkey, and professing its own deep anxiety to procure what it called "a just peace with Turkey," for which the Indian delegates to the War and to the Peace Conferences in Europe had been constantly instructed to plead. The greatest success which the _Khilafat_ agitators achieved was when Mr. Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded by them that the movement was a splendid manifestation of religious faith, as he himself described it to me. For, once satisfied that the cause which they had taken up was a religious cause, he was prepared to make it his own without inquiring too closely into its historical or political justification. For him it became a revolt of the Mahomedan religious conscience against the tyranny of the West just as legitimate as the revolt of the Hindu conscience against the same tyranny embodied in the Rowlatt Acts. Whilst