Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/159

 Nation demanded a National Course of Education, Money flowed in like water; the National University of Bengal was established. These activities provoked the official world. Repression, the favourite weapon of despots, was resorted to. The leaders of the movement were publicity humiliated; meetings were dispersed with regulation lathis. The path of repression is generally perilous and slippery, and it is no wonder that "the Bureaucracy marched from one repression to another." The armoury of repressive measures was replenished. The Deportation Act of 1818 was hunted out and Lala Lajpat Rai and Sirdar A jit Singh were spirited away to Burma (1907). Mr. Tilak was tried for sedition (1908) and transported. The Nationalist Party was routed. Babu Ashvini Kumar and eight other popular leaders were deported. A few crumbs of reforms, niggardly given and avidly accepted, were the reward of the surviving Party of Moderates who had shown their loyalty by rallying round the Bureaucratic banner. Eventually the Partition of Bengal was modified in 1911.

The Partition of Bengal, hateful as it was, consolidated that sense of Indian Nationality which common serfdom, wesstern education and the National Congress had done so much to foster. It is, however, remarkable that outside Bengal, those of the English-educated Indians who had hitherto too much paraded their "All India view" did the least to show in a practical way their sympathy with Bengal. Mr. Tilak, on the contrary, who owing to his Shivaji and Ganapati festivals, was regarded to have encouraged a spirit of particularism, was to the forefront, anxious to do his "little bit"