Page:Heroes of the hour- Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak Maharaj, Sir Subramanya Iyer.djvu/153

 decision in his favor, Mr. Tilak may very well claim that he never broke the stipulations he entered into, and claim also that even the imperfect law was more imperfectly administered so as to injure him and help his enemies.

Return from jail and a few months rest found Mr. Tilak fit again for public work. With his usual energy he threw himself again into Congress politics and travelled in 1898 so far South as Madras to attend the Congress that was being held there. He undertook a journey further South to Ceylon and got into better touch with the people of Southern India. The Sivaji celebration was once more an accomplished fact in 1900 and the inspiration Mr. Tilak gave at Raighad established it for ever as an annual festival. It came later on to be copied all over the country including the so-called benighted Madras.

Mr. Tilak was incessantly at work with his theory of the antiquity of the Vedas, working as he was very strenuously in the more mundane spheres of existence and this time he evolved not a statement merely based upon the Vedas and their astronomical significance but also on the undisputed facts of Geological Science worked out and stated by the most