wholly satisfactory, and it would be unfair to deny to many of Tilak’s followers a genuine desire to mitigate the evils and hardships to which their humbler fellow-creatures were exposed.  Prominent amongst such evils was the growth of drunkenness, and it would have been all to his honour that Tilak hastened to take up the cause of temperance, had he not perverted it, as he perverted everything else, to the promotion of race-hatred.  His primary motives may have been excellent, but he subordinated all things to his ruling anti-British passion, whilst the fervour of his philanthropic professions won for him the sympathy and co-operation of many law-abiding citizens who would otherwise have turned a deaf ear to his political doctrines.  He must have had a considerable command of funds for the purposes of his propaganda, and though he doubtless had not a few willing and generous supporters, many subscribed from fear of the lash which he knew how to apply through the Press to the tepid and the recalcitrant, just as his gymnastic societies sometimes resolved themselves into juvenile bands of dacoities to swell the coffers of Swaraj.  Not even Mr. Gokhale with all his moral and intellectual force could stem the flowing tide of Tilak’s popularity in the Deccan; and in order not to be swept under he was perhaps often compelled like many other Moderates to go further than his own judgment can have approved.  Tilak commanded the allegiance of barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in Government offices—­in fact, of the large majority of the so-called educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman castes; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men in the villages.

More than that.  From the Deccan, as we have already seen in his relations with the Indian National Congress, his influence was projected far and wide.  His house was a place of pilgrimage for the disaffected from all parts of India.  His prestige as a Brahman of the Brahmans and a pillar of orthodoxy, in spite of the latitude of the views which he sometimes expressed in regard to the depressed castes, his reputation for profound learning in the philosophies both of the West and of the East, his trenchant style, his indefatigable activity, the glamour of his philanthropy, his accessibility to high and low, his many acts of genuine kindliness, the personal magnetism which, without any great physical advantages, he exerted upon most of those who came in contact with him, and especially upon the young, combined to equip him more fully than any other Indian politician for the leadership of a revolutionary movement.