Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/253

 quietly pocketed it and did not so much as thank his iriends for their generosity. He took the present as a matter of course. Mr. Tilak was made of a far finer stuff. With simple modesty and characteristic gener- osity, he said : —

" I do not know what I can do with the money. I do not want it for my own sake nor would it be proper for me to accept it for personal use. I can only accept it in trust to spend it in a constitutional way for National work after adding my own quota to it."

If the people brought their birth-day present to Mr. Tilak, the Government, too, contributed their mite. They, too, sent a birth-day present to Mr. Tilak in the form of a notice calling upon him to show cause why he should not be bound over for good behaviour for a period of one year in a sum of Rupees 20,000 in his own recognizance and in two securities of Rs. 10,000 each. This is a striking illustration of how " Mr. Tilak's public life has been like a double-faced Janus — one face of it expressing the enjoyment and the delight of public ap- preciation and the other, inseparable from the first, expressing the toil of determined resistance to official persecution."

The Government wanted to silence Mr. Tilak, not to imprison him ; perhaps, the war came in the way. They, therefore, picked up three of his speeches — the ^one delivered (ist May 1916) at Balgaum and the other two at Ahmadnagar (31st May and ist June 1916). These speeches were models of sobriety and moderation. " Almost every alternate sentence pro- claimed the speaker's loyalty to the British connec- tion." Failing to find stronger exhibitions of Mr.