e
who sought in the right spirit for assistance or advice. He had absolute
control of the Sabha and ruled the municipality of Poona. In private and
in public, through his speeches and through his newspapers, he worked
upon the prejudices and passions of both the educated and the
uneducated, and especially upon the crude enthusiasm of the young.
Towards the end of 1896 the Deccan was threatened with famine. Hungry
stomachs are prompt to violence, and Tilak started a "no-rent" campaign.
Like all Tilak's schemes in those days it was carefully designed to
conceal as far as possible any direct incitement to the withholding of
land revenue. His missionaries went round with a story that Government
had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below
a certain yield. The _rayats_ believed them, and when the tax-gatherer
arrived they refused payment. Trouble then arose. Outrages such as the
mutilation of the Queen's statue at Bombay, the attempt to fire the
Church Mission Hall, the assaults upon "moderate" Hindus who refused to
toe the line, became ominously frequent. Worse was to follow when the
plague appeared. The measures at first adopted by Government to check
the spread of this new visitation doubtless offended in many ways
against the customs and prejudices of the people, especially the
searching and disinfection of houses, and the forcible removal of
plague-patients even when they happened to be Brahmans. What Tilak could
do by secret agitation and by a rabid campaign in the Press to raise
popular resentment to a white heat he did. The _Kesari_ published
incitements to violence which were put into the mouth of Shivaji
himself[4]. The inevitable consequences ensued. On June 27, 1897, on
their way back from an official reception in celebration of Queen
Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand, an Indian civilian, who was
President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the
Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young
Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road. No direct connexion has been
established between that crime and Tilak. But, like the murderer of Mr.
Jackson at Nasik last winter, the murderer of Rand and Ayerst--the same
young Brahman who had recited the _Shlok_, which I have quoted above, at
the great Shivaji celebration--declared that it was the doctrines
expounded in Tilak's newspapers that had driven him to the deed. The
murderer who had merely given effe