Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/36

16 his fellowship in the Elphinstone College did not escape suspicion. The impression of the two upheavels of 1857 and 1876 on the mind of Mr. Tilak was in inverse proportion to their magnitude and importance. The former was an incident which happened when he was quite a baby and so the impression which he formed concerning it in his boyhood was necessarily hazy. In the case of the latter, our hero was a full-fledged gentleman, well-armed and equipped with knowledge and reason. He saw how immature, thoughtless and foolish the attempt of Wasudev Balavant was; and from this time must be dated his horror of bloody revolutions. He clearly saw that if Indians had to fight with Anglo-Indian despots, it could only be, not with sword and gun, but with pen and tongue. He saw that the secret of the English power in India lay in their superior education and organisation, and that we could wrest that power only by meeting the English on their own ground. The collection of a few fire-arms and the slaughter of a handful of officials would not shake the well-established British Government in India and such attempts would only recoil upon us by rivetting our chains.

The third event that impressed his youthful heart was the terrible famine of 1877-8 with its toll of 50 lakhs of lives. He passed sleepless nights and began to find out the cause of such an abnormal condition. Throughout his life Mr. Tilak was a friend of the poor. Even Mr. Nevinson, a casual acquaintance of his was impressed with Mr. Tilak's concern for the poor. It was here, in this terrible famine of 1877-8,