Though some were inclined to look askance at their intervention, the efforts of this little peace-party did engender a better feeling, and this, coupled with a natural weariness of prolonged hostilities and the loss of their wages, resulted in the gradual return of tranquillity after the sixth day. By the end of the first week of August, affairs had resumed their normal course, the mill-hands were again at work, and the Bombay Government were at liberty to consider the salient features and lessons of the outbreak. Sir George Clarke, the Governor, was blamed in some quarters for having paid a sympathetic visit, after the close of the riots, to wounded mill-hands in the Sir J.J. Hospital. But his policy in this matter was dictated by an earnest desire to smooth away the bitterness which measures of repression are calculated to provoke, and by a conviction that there had been an absence of contact between the local authorities and the industrial population, which had been permitted to fall completely under the lawless influence of Tilak and his immediate followers. The fact that the disturbances lasted for a whole week invited a doubt whether the police arrangements were as effective as they might have been, and whether indeed a more efficient intelligence organization might not have facilitated a speedier conclusion of the unsatisfactory duties which the military were called upon to perform. An impression prevailed that, although the mill-hands who defied the police and troops had been severely punished, the real authors and fomenters of the disturbances had managed to escape scot-free, and that they could not have enjoyed such immunity, if the police had had their fingers more closely upon the pulse of the City.
So far as concerns the prosecution and conviction of Tilak, Sir George Clarke won “the respect of the vast majority of the community, and although he failed to secure the active support which he might have expected from the ‘moderates’, there were few of them who did not secretly approve and even welcome his action. Its effects were great and enduring, for Tilak’s conviction was a heavy blow to the forces of unrest, at least in the Deccan; and some months later, one of the organs of his party, the _Rashtramat_, reviewing the occurrences of the year, was fain to admit that ‘the sudden removal of Mr. Tilak’s towering personality threw the whole province into dismay and unnerved the other leaders’”.[114]