This judgment confirmed the common Indian opinion that British justice can best be looked for in the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, because the judges appointed directly by the Crown can maintain the law without being unconsciously prejudiced by long service under the Anglo-Indian routine. But, unfortunately, owing to Mr. Tilak’s past record, and his connection with the Extremist papers, the ruinous action taken against him had the air of persecution, and laid the Bombay Government open to a charge of vindictiveness. It was during these proceedings that Mr. Tilak displayed his fine unconcern by issuing his treatise on the origin of the Vedas, and in the end, when his innocence was finally established, he found that a leader’s greatest advantage of having suffered for his cause was indefinitely increased. When I met him that evening on the mountain top, another crisis of his fate was just being decided, but nothing could surpass his outward calm. He was living in one of the dilapidated bungalows thinly scattered over the plateau. I was put to lodge in another empty one, because, belonging, as he does, to the same high caste as Mr. Gokhale, and to the same subsection of it, he refuses, as a strict Hindu, to emancipate himself from the caste obligations and live or eat with mere Europeans. All that night the wind roared over the mountains, but with the first sun he came to lead me round the elaborate ruins of the fortifications, and, as though he had no interest in the world except as tourist’s guide, he showed me where the British guns had battered, and where, in the time of the Mahratta hero, Shivaji, two hundred and forty years ago, his own ancestors crept up the precipice at night and scaled this very wall, aided by a great lizard that was trained to carry a string up the surface and hold tight with its claws till a man could climb. So at this dizzy spot the party had climbed; then killed.