Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/161

 coveted opportunity of consolidating our feeling of Indian Nationality by leading an All-India Movement for the double purpose of righting the wrong and awakening and organizing the country.

This was a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. In his own province, his immense popularity, due to twenty-five years of courageous, self-sacrificing and single-minded work enabled him to carry the message of Swadeshi and Swaraj down to the most distant hamlets. He had trained up a number of people in the work of organization and agitation. Hundreds of his students, scattered over the Presidency had received incentive to public activities from his personal contact and his weekly writings in the Kesari. His frequent tours in Maharashtra had enabled him to organize his province for National work and so successful was his organization that no sooner did he sound the slogan of Swadeshi and Boycott than the note was echoed and re-echoed throughout the length and breadth of Western India. Not a village in the province but had its Swadeshi meetings; not a town but had its swadeshi shops.

But this was not the only work Mr. Tilak had to do now. There is no work more difficult than of directing, organizing and controlling movements in such distant places as Bengal, the Punjab and Madras. The difficulty lies in the fact that while the initiative in several matters must be left to the leaders on the spot, the whole movement must present a single idea and a single purpose manifested in consistent and uniform activities. The leader of the whole movement must needs be a man who will command respect and obedience and whose