respect.  Nevertheless, a resolution as amended by Tilak was adopted which, without mentioning the word “boycott,” pledged the Congress to encourage its practice.  But there was considerable heartburning, and the Moderates were suspected of contemplating some retrograde move at the following annual session.  Tilak was determined to frustrate any such scheme, and before the Congress assembled at Surat he elaborated at a Nationalist conference with Mr. Arabindo Ghose in the chair, a plan of campaign which was to defeat the “moderates” by demanding, before the election of the president, an undertaking that the resolutions of the Calcutta conference should be upheld.  The plan, however, was only half successful.  The first day’s proceedings produced a violent scene in which the howling down of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee by the “advanced” wing revealed the personal jealousies that had grown up between the old Bengalee leader on the one hand and Tilak and his younger followers in Bengal on the other.  The second day’s proceedings ended in still wilder confusion, and after something like a free fight the Congress broke up after an irreparable rupture, from which its prestige has never recovered.

Tilak’s own prestige, however, with the “advanced” party never stood higher, either in then Deccan or outside of it.  In the Deccan he not only maintained all his old activities, but had extended their field.  Besides the Kal, edited by another Chitpawan Brahman, and the Rashtramadt at Poona, which went to even greater lengths than Tilak’s own Kesari, lesser papers obeying his inspiration had been established in many of the smaller centres.  A movement had been set on foot for the creation of “national” schools, entirely independent of State support, and therefore of State supervision, in which disaffection could, without let or hindrance, be made part and parcel of the curriculum.  Such were the schools closed down last year in the Central Provinces and this year at Telegaon.  The great development of the cotton industry during the last ten years, especially in Bombay itself—­which has led to vast agglomerations of labour under conditions unfamiliar in India—­had given Tilak an opportunity of establishing contact with a class of the population hitherto outside the purview of Indian politics.  There are nearly 100 cotton spinning and weaving mills, employing over 100,000 operatives, congregated mostly in the northern suburbs of the city.  Huddled together in huge tenements this compact population affords by its density, as well as by its ignorance, a peculiarly accessible field to the trained agitator.  Tilak’s emissaries, mostly Brahmans of the Deccan, brought, moreover, to their nefarious work the added prestige of a caste which seldom condescends to rub shoulders with those whose mere contact may involve “pollution.”  In this, as in many other cases, politics were closely mixed up with philanthropy, for the conditions of labour in India are by no means