Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/382

 and affairs. It may have enabled him to equip himself the better for the mission of his life. But at the same time, we must not forget, that he lost eleven precious years of political leadership. Eleven years! and to a man Hke Mr. Tilak ! What a world of difference it would have made ! As it was, when lesser men were dominating the public life, and moulding the national will, Mr. Tilak was busy teaching Statistics and Astronomy, Sanskrit and Science to college students, figting all the while with the ever-growing clique which ultimately threw him out. In the first Session of the Indian National Congress, the first resolution was moved by the late Mr. G. Subramania Aiyar, born in 1856, the year of Mr. Tilak's birth ; while he, Mr. Tilak was at Poona shaping the infant college into life and strength. It is impossible and at the same time idle to discuss the possibilities, had Mr. Tilak started life as the sole editor of the Kesari and the Mahratta. But it is just possible that in his pursuit of what proved to be a phantom, the process of galvanizing the Congress and the public life of the country was delayed by a decade.

Within the walls of the school and the college, soon after their existence was assured, a struggle awaited Mr. Tilak which gave a rude shock to his innate idealism. It was a struggle between a great man and comparatively small men, between idealism and worldly wisdom, between unbending adherence to the original understanding and the demands of worldly ease. These differences were probably aggravated by the introduction of personal element. There is no thought more humiliating to ordinary minds than the growing consciousness that the man, whom in school or in college we re-