before it broke away from its constitutional moorings. The non-Brahmans, nevertheless, under the leadership of such resolute men as the late Dr. Nair, fought their way steadily to the front, and, being of course in a large majority, they had only to organise in order to make full use of the opportunity which a relatively democratic franchise afforded them for the first time at the recent elections. They can hardly themselves have foreseen how great their opportunity was, for they regarded the reforms at first with deep suspicion as calculated merely to transfer substantive power from a British to a Brahman bureaucracy, and so deep was their dread of Brahman ascendancy even in the new Councils that they clamoured to the very end for a much larger number of seats than the sixteen that were ultimately reserved as "communal" seats for non-Brahman electorates. They never needed such a reservation, for they actually carried the day in so many of the "general" constituencies that out of ninety-eight elected members of the new Provincial Council only fourteen are Brahmans, and it is the Brahmans now who complain, not without reason, that their representation falls short of their legitimate influence in the State, and are already demanding a reservation of "communal" seats for their own caste in future. Lord Willingdon, as a constitutional Governor, chose from the non-Brahman majority in the Council all the three Indian Ministers who form part of the new Provincial Government and preside over the "transferred" departments. This is the most startling transformation scene which any of the Provincial elections has produced. The non-Brahmans have got the chance which they have long claimed. If they rise to the occasion, deal with the Brahmans more fairly than the latter dealt with them, and, remembering the struggle they have had for their own emancipation, help the "untouchables" to rise in their turn out of the state of degradation to which centuries of Brahman domination have condemned them, the reforms may prove to have been perhaps as important a landmark in the moral regeneration of Hindu society as in the development of the Indian body politic. For, though it would be unfair to forget that the rigidity of the great caste system probably alone saved Hindu society from complete disintegration during centuries of internal anarchy and foreign invasions, its survival would be fatal now to the advancement of India on new lines of democratic progress. In any case the triumph of the non-Brahmans is an unmistakable blow to "Non-co-operation." Their one grievance against British rule has hitherto been that it tolerated Brahman ascendancy and refused to co-operate with them in their passionate struggle against it. But now there is nothing to damp their zeal or deter them from co-operating with Government in securing the permanent success of the reforms to which, as they have to admit in spite of their former suspicions, they owe a