none of the arts which make for popularity.  His house was always open to those who sought in the right spirit for assistance or advice.  He had absolute control of the Sabha and ruled the municipality of Poona.  In private and in public, through his speeches and through his newspapers, he worked upon the prejudices and passions of both the educated and the uneducated, and especially upon the crude enthusiasm of the young.  Towards the end of 1896 the Deccan was threatened with famine.  Hungry stomachs are prompt to violence, and Tilak started a “no-rent” campaign.  Like all Tilak’s schemes in those days it was carefully designed to conceal as far as possible any direct incitement to the withholding of land revenue.  His missionaries went round with a story that Government had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below a certain yield.  The rayats believed them, and when the tax-gatherer arrived they refused payment.  Trouble then arose.  Outrages such as the mutilation of the Queen’s statue at Bombay, the attempt to fire the Church Mission Hall, the assaults upon “moderate” Hindus who refused to toe the line, became ominously frequent.  Worse was to follow when the plague appeared.  The measures at first adopted by Government to check the spread of this new visitation doubtless offended in many ways against the customs and prejudices of the people, especially the searching and disinfection of houses, and the forcible removal of plague-patients even when they happened to be Brahmans.  What Tilak could do by secret agitation and by a rabid campaign in the Press to raise popular resentment to a white heat he did.  The Kesari published incitements to violence which were put into the mouth of Shivaji himself[4].  The inevitable consequences ensued.  On June 27, 1897, on their way back from an official reception in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand, an Indian civilian, who was President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road.  No direct connexion has been established between that crime and Tilak.  But, like the murderer of Mr. Jackson at Nasik last winter, the murderer of Rand and Ayerst—­the same young Brahman who had recited the Shlok, which I have quoted above, at the great Shivaji celebration—­declared that it was the doctrines expounded in Tilak’s newspapers that had driven him to the deed.  The murderer who had merely given effect to the teachings of Tilak was sentenced to death, but Tilak himself, who was prosecuted for a seditious article published a few days before the murder, received only a short term of imprisonment, and was released before the completion of his term under certain pledges of good behaviour which he broke as soon as it suited him to break them.

Thus ended the first campaign of Indian unrest, which, in its details, has served as an incitement and a model to all those who have conducted subsequent operations in the same field.