This was one of the special features of the "Non-co-operation" campaign in the United Provinces, and Mr. Gandhi himself arrived on the scene to lend it the full weight of his personal influence on the very eve of the elections. How extraordinary is the influence of his mesmeric personality and style of oratory I realised when I drove out on the day of the elections into a district outside Allahabad where he had himself addressed on the previous afternoon a vast crowd of twenty thousand peasants. It was about noon, and only a few creaking bullock-carts and "the footfall mute of the slow camel"--neither of them suggestive of a hotly contested election--disturbed the drowsy peace which even in the coolest 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.