Friday's telegrams from Bombay state that Mr. Tilak, the Nationalist
leader, was arrested on Wednesday evening on a charge of publishing a seditious article in his newspaper, the Kesari, a Marathi weekly published at Poona. The hearing of the case was adjourned until to-day. The purport of the article on which the charge is based, according to the summary of the Times, is to accuse the white bureaucracy of driving the native Indians to desperation, and compelling them to imitate the methods of the Russian people. Mr. Tilak, it will be remembered, was in 1897, while a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, charged with seditious writing in the Kesari, and sentenced to eighteen months' confinement and a fine of £66. He appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, but his appeal was rejected. It was Mr. Tilak who, at the last Indian National Congress, led the movement which broke up that body. We do not wish to pre- judice Mr. Tilak when he is under trial, but there is no doubt that he represents the most aggressive type of the Poona Brahmins,—the strongest opponents of British rule in India. It must not be supposed, however, that he is in any sense the leader of a great popular or democratic movement. To the Indian masses his name is probably quite as unknown as' it is to "the man in the street" at home.
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