Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/389

 tion of Mr. Tilak in 1897 was the first serious attempt of the Bureaucracy to secure the silence of a " troublesome " agitator. So weak were the traditions of our pubhc life, that Mr. Tilak's persistence in braving the ire of an inflamed officialdom was regarded almost as an act of madness and great pressure was brought to induce him to apologize. A similar attempt made (i892)tosave a Calcutta newspaper from the operations of 124A by a belated apology had been criticized by Mr. Tilak and he was not a man to set up one standard of conduct for others and quite another for himself. He cheerfully went to gaol rather than bend his knee before the powers that be. The terrors of gaol could not cow him down, nor did the actual prison -Ufe with its nauseating food and fatiguing work. Though he came out of the portals of the Yeravda gaol a broken man, his spirit was as unbending as ever and after a few months of rest and recuperation, he took up the threads of his public activities, unhampered by the reactionary regime of Lord Curzon, imdeterred by the machinations of his enemies in the Tai Maharaj Case.

A great man never suffers without gaining in spiritual strength ; and the sufferings of Mr. Tilak in the Tai Maharaj case were proverbial. In the earlier stages of this case, there were occasions when Mr. Tilak's clouds were unredeemed by any " silver lining ', when expressions of hope would have sounded as nothing but ' hollow mockery or premature consolations," But he refused to be disheartened by the manifold odds against him. The mighty resources of a prejudiced Bureaucracy, coupled with the endless scheming of unscrupulous enemies failed to shake his faith in the