n, as in 1905, the Congress might
have been deemed to have over-stepped those constitutional limits by
endorsing the Bengalee doctrine of boycott.

Though the majority of the Congress probably glided unconsciously or
without any deliberate purpose from, its earlier attitude of
remonstrance and entreaty into violent denunciation of Government and
all its works, there had always been a small group determined to drive
or to manoeuvre their colleagues as a body into an attitude of open and
irreconcilable hostility. That group was headed by Tilak, the strongest
personality in Indian politics, who was gradually making recruits among
the more ardent spirits all over India. On one occasion, as far back as
1895, when the Congress held its annual session in his own city of
Poona, he had attempted to commit it to the aggressive doctrines which
he was already preaching in the Deccan, but he soon discovered that the
temper of the majority was against him. He was, however, far too
tenacious ever to accept defeat. He bided his time. He knew he had to
reckon with powerful personal jealousies, and he remained in the
background. His opportunity did not come till ten years later when he
pulled the strings at the two successive sessions held in 1905 at
Benares and in 1906 at Calcutta. It was then that the Congress passed
from mere negative antagonism into almost direct defiance of Government.
It must have been a proud moment for Tilak when the very man who had
often fought so courageously against his inflammatory methods and
reactionary tendencies in the Deccan, Mr. Gokhale, played into his
hands, and from the presidential chair at Benares got up to commend the
boycott as a political weapon used for a definite political purpose. A
year later, it is true, Mr. Gokhale and the "moderate" party in the
Congress, who had seen in the meantime to what lawlessness the boycott
was leading, were anxious to undo or to mitigate at the Calcutta session
what they had helped to do at Benares. But again, by dint of lobbying
and even more by threatening to break up the Congress, Tilak carried the
day, and a resolution was passed in the form upon which he insisted to
the effect that the boycott movement was legitimate. It was not till the
following year at Surat, after the preaching of lawlessness had begun to
yield its inevitable harvest of crime, that the "moderates" recoiled at
last from the quicksands into which the "extremists" were leading them.
Tilak,