hem all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu
orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the
_Kesari_, _i.e._ "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on
racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social
Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and
his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid
campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta
people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who
first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination,
and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the
patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting
British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of
_Swadeshi_, was to be the first step towards _Swaraj_. He it was too who
for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of
political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and
students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The
movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials
in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the
sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment
on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Partition of
Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines
and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in
India.

The Partition of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it
for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some
70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single
provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive
race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the
three great "Presidencies" of India, of their capital as the capital
city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their
Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities,
though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities
Act. They resented the Partition, against which they had no remedy, as a
wanton _diminutio capitis_ inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy
bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders
in pressing the claims of India to political emancipation from
bureaucratic leading-strin