Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/74

54 religious leaders for support, (2) Those who wanted to avail themselves of caste-unions, (3) Those who were willing to accept legislation for themselves and (4) Those who wanted legislation applicable to all. He concluded by saying that as Mr. Tilak had fairly advanced up to the third stage, there was very little-difference between himself and Mr. Tilak.

What, then, was the difference between the school of thought represented by Mr. Ranade and that represented by Mr. Tilak? For difference—vital difference—there was, in spite of Mr. Ranade's attempt to emphasise the points of agreement. The difference was this that while Ranade was prepared, if convenient, to coquette with religious sanction to social reform, Mr. Tilak insisted that there should be no divorce between the two. The former wanted to utilise, for the propagation of his ideas, the disintegrating forces that had come in the wake of the English conquest; the latter while emphatically not unfriendly to social reform, believed in the imperative necessity of checking, from the larger national standpoint, the disintegrating forces by fostering a due sense of pride in and respect for the social and religious institutions of the people. The former depended solely on Western influence and thought; Mr. Tilak was for the blending of the old culture and the new. The former welcomed State-interference in matters social, the latter strongly resented it for the simple reason that reform to be durable must be a growth from within. Differing thus in their outlook, it is not surprising that while Ranade was prepared to associate and work with wild and reckless people, people who