The elections in the Southern Provinces presented a somewhat different picture though the defeat of "Non-co-operation" was equally complete. The Nerbudda river has been from times immemorial a great dividing line, climatic, racial, and often political, between Northern and Southern India. It still is so. For, whilst with a few relatively unimportant exceptions the whole of British India--save Burma, which, except from an administrative point of view, is not India at all--has been brought with perhaps excessive uniformity within the scope of the new constitutional reforms, many conditions in the Central Provinces and in the great Presidency of Madras differ widely from those prevailing in the other major provinces north of the Nerbudda, and the actual failure of "Non-co-operation" to enforce its boycott of the elections was less noteworthy than some other features in the new situation. In the Central Provinces the elections themselves were fought out on much the same lines as in the north and with very similar results, if allowance is made for the intellectual backwardness of the province. Political activity and agitation had been confined in the past mainly to Nagpur, the capital, and to the western districts, in which a large Mahratta element predominates especially amongst the better-educated classes. Most of Mr. Tilak's former followers there had joined the "Non-co-operation" movement, and their rigid abstention from the elections left the doors of the Provincial Council wide open for the representation of more sober Indian opinion. The Extremists showed their contempt for the new assembly by putting up one or two "freak" candidates in breach of the boycott they were preaching, and actually got in a _dhobi_, or laundryman, at Jubbulpur. But the elections were overshadowed by the preparations for the Nagpur Congress, which was to be the great Gandhi counterblast to the Reforms, and the Extremists, who poured into the province from the neighbouring Bombay Presidency, concentrated their efforts on the creation of an atmosphere of general unrest favourable to the new line of campaign upon which the rump of the old Indian National Congress was about to enter with the open renunciation of the fundamental article of its original creed--loyalty to the British connection.