The appeal which Tilak made to the Hindus was twofold.  He taught them, on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien “demons”; and that if the British raj had at one time served some useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held out to them the prospect that, if power were once restored to the Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men.  That Tilak himself hardly believed in the possibility of overthrowing British rule is more than probable, but what some Indians who knew him well tell me he did believe was that the British could be driven or wearied by a ceaseless and menacing agitation into gradually surrendering to the Brahmans the reality of power, as did the later Peshwas, and remaining content with the mere shadow of sovereignty.  As one of his organs blurted it out:—­“If the British yield all power to us and retain only nominal control, we may yet be friends.”

Such was the position when, on June 24, 1908, Tilak was arrested in Bombay on charges connected with the publication in the Kesari of articles containing inflammatory comments on the Muzafferpur outrage, in which Mrs. and Miss Kennedy had been killed by a bomb—­the first of a long list of similar outrages in Bengal.  Not in the moment of first excitement, but weeks afterwards, the Kesari had commented on this crime in terms which the Parsee Judge, Mr. Justice Davar, described in his summing up as follows:—­“They are seething with sedition; they preach violence; they speak of murders with approval; and the cowardly and atrocious act of committing murders with bombs not only meets with your approval, but you hail the advent of the bomb into India as if something had come to India for its good.”  The bomb was extolled in these articles as “a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet,” and the Kesari delighted in showing that neither the “supervision of the police” nor “swarms of detectives” could stop “these simple playful sports of science,” Whilst professing to deprecate such methods, it threw the responsibility upon Government, which allowed “keen disappointment to overtake thousands of intelligent persons who have been awakened to the necessity of securing the rights of Swaraj.”  Tilak spoke four whole days in his own defence—­21-1/2 hours altogether—­but the jury returned a verdict of “Guilty,” and he was sentenced to six years’ transportation, afterwards commuted on account of his age and health to simple imprisonment at Mandalay.