Page:Heroes of the hour- Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak Maharaj, Sir Subramanya Iyer.djvu/161

 Unseen Hand which worked through that great Lord Curzon, that that year marked the new era in Indian politics. The partition of Bengal was an event full of potentialities for the awakening of the Indian political consciousness and the leaders of Bengal—old and young—took up the question of Indian aspirations in right earnest. The partition of the Bengalee speaking population, knit as they were into a peculiar fabric of unity by long established development of literature and thought, threw the whole country into the suspicion that the Bureaucracy was beginning to use the imperialistic weapon of “Divide and Rule” to its fullest capacity over-riding even the natural affinity of language. Hence the movement against the step taken by the Curzon Government spread like wild-fire and developed gradually into the Swadeshi-Boycott-National Education-Swaraj agitation of the first ten years of this century. Mr. Tilak would not be Mr. Tilak the leader, if he did not see into the great prospects of a wonderful movement like the Anti-Partition movement. The obstinacy of the Bureaucracy in the face of voilent opposition proved the utter futility of the old methods of mendicancy. It was all