of the approaches had not compelled him regretfully to leave his machine-guns behind.  His purpose, he declared, was to “strike terror into the whole of the Punjab.”  He may have achieved it for the time, though the evidence on this point is conflicting, but what he achieved far more permanently and effectively was to create in the Jallianwala Bagh, purchased since then as a “Martyrs’ Memorial” by the Indian National Congress, a place of perpetual pilgrimage for racial hatred.

Then, two days after—­not before—­Jallianwala came the formal proclamation of martial law in the Punjab, and though there were no more Jallianwalas, what but racial hatred could result from a constant stream of petty and vindictive measures enforced even after the danger of rebellion, however real it may at first have seemed, had passed away?  Sir Michael O’Dwyer protested, it is true, against General Dyer’s monstrous “crawling order,” and it was promptly disallowed.  But what of many other “orders” which were not disallowed?  What of the promiscuous floggings and whippings, the indiscriminate arrests and confiscations, the so-called “fancy punishments” designed not so much to punish individual “rebels” as to terrorise and humiliate?  What of the whole judicial or quasi-judicial administration of martial law?  The essential facts are on record now in the Report of the Hunter Committee and in the evidence taken before it, though its findings were not entirely unanimous and the majority report of the European members, five in number including the president Lord Hunter, formerly Solicitor-General for Scotland, was accompanied by a minority report signed by the three Indian members, two of them now Ministers in the Government of Bombay and of the United Provinces respectively, who on several points attached graver importance to the circumstances which they themselves had chiefly helped to elicit from witnesses under examination.  Upon the Report the Government of India and His Majesty’s Government expressed in turn their views in despatches which are also public property.  The responsibility of the Government of India was so deeply involved, and in a lesser degree that of the Secretary of State, that in neither case was judgment likely to err on the side of severity.  The Government of India certainly did not so err, and one must turn to the despatch embodying the views of the British Government for a considered judgment which at least set forth in weighty terms the principles of British policy that had been violated in the Punjab, however short some may consider it to have fallen of the full requirements of justice in appraising the gravity of the departure from those principles in specific cases.

The Punjab tragedy has had such far-reaching effects in shaking the confidence of the Indian people in the justice and even in the humanity of British rule that it is best to quote the language in which the British Government recorded their judgment in their despatch to the Government of India: