All this opens up wide fields for speculation, but there is one point which a statement solemnly made by the murderer of Mr. Jackson has placed beyond the uncertainties of speculation.  In reply to the magistrate who asked him why he committed the murder, Kanhere said:—­

I read of many instances of oppression in the Kesari, the Rashtramat and the Kal and other newspapers.  I think that by killing sahibs [Englishmen] we people can get justice.  I never got injustice myself nor did any one I know.  I now regret killing Mr. Jackson.  I killed a good man causelessly.

Can anything be much more eloquent and convincing than the terrible pathos of this confession?[6] The three papers named by Kanhere were Tilak’s organs.  It was no personal experience or knowledge of his own that had driven Kanhere to his frenzied deed, but the slow persistent poison dropped into his ear by the Tilak Press.  Though it was Kanhere’s hand that struck down “a good man causelessly,” was not Tilak rather than Kanhere the real author of the murder?  It was merely the story of the Poona murders of 1897 over again.

Other incidents besides the Nasik tragedy have occurred since Tilak’s conviction to show how dangerous was the spirit which his doctrines had aroused.  One of the, gravest, symptomatically, was the happily unsuccessful attempt to throw a bomb at the Viceroy and Lady Minto whilst they were driving through the streets of Ahmedabad during their visit to the Bombay Presidency last November.  For that outrage constituted an ominous breach of all the old Hindu traditions which invest the personal representative of the Sovereign with a special sanctity.

But in spite of spasmodic outbreaks, of which we may not yet have seen the end, aggressive disloyalty in the Deccan has been at least temporarily set back since the downfall of Tilak.  The firmer attitude adopted by the Government of India and such repressive measures as the Press Act, combined with judicious reforms, have done much; but it was by the prosecution of Tilak that the forces of militant unrest lost their ablest and boldest leader—­perhaps the only one who might have concentrated their direction, not only in the Deccan, but in the whole of India, in his own hands and given to the movement, with all its varied and often conflicting tendencies, an organization and unity which it still happily seems to lack.

CHAPTER V.

POONA AND KOLHAPUR.

It is not, after all, in British India (i.e., in that part of India which we directly administer) that the Brahmanical and reactionary character of Indian unrest, at any rate in the Deccan, can best be studied.  There it can always be disguised under the “patriotic” aspects of a revolt against alien rule.  To appreciate its real tendencies we must go to a Native State of the Deccan about 100 miles south of Poona.  Kolhapur