CHAPTER IX
THE FIERY CROSS
Rejoice and fear not for the waves that swell. The storms that thunder, winds that sweep. Always our Captain holds the rudder well. He does not sleep.
THAT, for nearly eighteen years of his life, Mr. Tilak was involved in a private litigation, arising out of an unnatural alliance between an inexperienced young widow, a number of unscrupulous persons inimical to him and the mighty Bureaucracy hopelessly prejudiced against him, is known to all. The Tai Maharaj Case was really a flank movement on the public career of Mr. Tilak and was intended to drive him out of public life by judicially proving his dishonesty. Fortunately Mr. Tilak did ultimately triumph. But before the final victory came, he suffered two reverses which were fully exploited by his political enemies. The judgment of Mr. Justice Chandavarkar (1910) with its unwarranted aspersions on Mr. Tilak's character, was of invaluable aid to Sir Valentine Chirol in villifying him. Apart from the capital made out of it by the allies of the Bureaucracy, the Tai Maharaj case, in its winding courses, threatened to ruin Mr. Tilak in every possible way. It put him
