Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/16

x to me again and again when, taking advantage of the obscurity which hung over his earlier activities, many of his enthusiastic opponents in Western India actively set themselves to indulge in cheap gibes by irreverential and by no means fair references to what they considered to be his mistakes. In this, they can be pardoned for, being young, these opponents might have been the dupes of misunderstandings born in an atmosphere of party prejudices. But their attacks certainly led me to go beneath the surface of things and inquire w^hat truth there was in them. And after three year's patient work, I find that Mr. Tilak's activities, far from having the shortcomings and inconsistencies of a political opportunist, have all the well-sustained unity of a beautiful drama, in which each scene is organically related to the preceding and to the succeeding and all together make one harmonious whole.

It would have been almost impossible for me to do this laborious work without the active co-operation of my friends. Their number is legion. I shall take this opportunity of thanking only a few of them ; and if I have to omit individual reference to all, that is due to the limits of an ordinary pre-