These Muharram disturbances, though imposing a severe strain upon the Commissioner and the police force, caused less concern to the general public than the prolonged rioting in the industrial quarter in July, 1908, when more than 400,000 mill-hands broke into open disorder after the conviction of the late Bal Gangadhar Tilak for sedition by the High Court. Tilak had been arrested in Bombay on June 24th on charges arising out of the publication in his paper, the _Kesari_, of articles containing inflammatory comments on the Muzaffarpur outrage, in which Mrs. and Miss Kennedy had been killed by a bomb—the first of a long list of similar outrages in Bengal. 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 for four whole days in his own defence—21½ 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.”[113] From the moment of his arrest, Tilak’s agents and followers descended upon the mill-area of Bombay and sedulously spread the story that Tilak had been arrested because he was the friend of the industrial workers and had tried to obtain better wages for them. Some of them were reported to have declared during the trial that there would be a day’s bloodshed for every year to which he might be sentenced by the Court. Most of the ‘jobbers’ who control the supply of labour were easily won over, and Tilak’s Brahman emissaries from Poona found many co-adjutors among their own caste-men in Bombay, and among the Bhandaris and Konkani Marathas living in Parel, Tardeo, Chinchpugli and Dadar sections. Curiously enough the Ghatis, or Marathas from the Deccan, showed far less interest in the trial of Tilak and far less disposition to violence than their caste-fellows from Ratnagiri and other districts of the western seaboard. The Deccan mill-hands at Sewri, for example, at the very height of the rioting, informed an Englishman with whom they were familiar that he need fear no harm from them, and they confirmed their words by taking no share in the disturbance which lasted for six days. The hostile attitude of the Konkani Marathas was due to the continuous efforts of agitators, and this was particularly the case in the neighbourhood of Currey and De Lisle roads, where special agents from their own districts had been introduced by Tilak’s revolutionaries.