Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/164

 equality was abroad. Mr. Tilak was everywhere praised for declaring, in a public lecture, that all castes are equal and that graduation of castes is foreign to Hindu religion and is unsupported by Vedic texts. Meetings were held not in thousands but in hundreds of thousands. Poets sang of patriotism. A truly National Literature was born. The great revival promised to sweep away all barriers and deluge the country.

The intellectual revolution produced by the movement was more remarkable still. When Lord Curzon cut Bengal in twain with a stroke of pen, the centre of gravity of all our activities changed from the Government to the people. It was Ranade who once said that our petitions, though mainly drawn out for Government were also intended to awaken the people. The Nationalist party went a few steps further and declared that all our writings and speeches were intended for the people; Government might, if they wanted, take note of them.

The boycott movement gave a deathblow to all the free-trade theories in which the generation represented by the majority of the then leaders was trained up. People clearly came to realize how England had strangled Indian Industries and they were determined, in the absence of any protective tariff in the interest of Indian manufactures, to boycott British goods.

But the greatest contribution made by the movement to the political life of the country was the fixing of the goal of all our endeavours. Ours is perhaps the first instance in the history of the world, where for a couple of generations, the children of the soil did believe their conquerors to be their deliverers. Mr. Tilak was the first to give a rub to this easy-going faith. His Shivaji