The Poona murders sent a thrill of horror throughout India and caused a momentary sensation even in England.  But though Government was not wholly blind to the warning, it could not decide what ought to be done, and beyond tinkering at one or two sections of the Criminal Code bearing on Press offences, it did nothing until history had repeated itself on a much larger scale.  Tilak was generously released from prison before the expiration of his sentence, and his release was construed in the Deccan as a fresh triumph.  He was acclaimed by his followers as a “national” martyr and hero.  After a short “rest-cure” in a sanatorium Tilak returned to the Kesari, which, in the hands of his co-adjutors, two other Chitpavan Brahmans, Mr. Kelkar and Mr. Khadilkar, had lost nothing of its vitriolic pungency in his absence.  The celebration with renewed pomp in 1900 of Shivaji’s “birthday” at Raighar marked the resumption of Tilak’s operations.  I need not stop to recount all the incidents of this second campaign in the Deccan, in which Ganpati celebrations, Shivaji festivals, gymnastic societies, &c., played exactly the same part as in the first campaign.  For three or four years the Tai Maharaj case, in which, as executor of one of his friends, Shri Baba Maharaj, a Sirdar of Poona, Tilak was attacked by the widow and indicted on charges of forgery, perjury, and corruption, absorbed a great deal of his time, but, after long and wearisome proceedings, the earlier stages of the case ended in a judgment in his favour which was greeted as another triumph for him, and not unnaturally though, as recent developments have shown, quite prematurely,[5] won him much sympathy, even amongst those who were politically opposed to him.  But throughout this ordeal Tilak never relaxed his political activity either in the Press or in the manifold organizations which he controlled.

His influence, moreover, was rapidly extending far beyond, Poona and the Deccan.  He had at an early date associated himself with, the Indian National Congress, and he was secretary of the Standing Committee for the Deccan.  His Congress work had brought him into contact with the politicians of other provinces, and upon none did his teachings and his example produce so deep an impression as upon the emotional Bengalees.  He had not the gift of sonorous eloquence which they possess, and he never figured conspicuously as an orator at the annual sessions of Congress.  But his calculating resourcefulness and his indomitable energy, even his masterfulness, impressed them all the more, and in the two memorable sessions held at Benares in 1905 and at Calcutta in 1906, when the agitation over the Partition of Bengal was at its height, his was the dominant personality, not at the tribune, but in the lobbies.  He had been one of the first champions of Swadeshi as an economic weapon in the struggle against British rule, and he saw in the adoption of the boycott, with all the lawlessness