impossible to avoid the conclusion that the majority of Lord Hunter’s Committee have failed to express themselves in terms which, unfortunately, the facts not only justify, but necessitate.  In paragraphs 16 to 25 of chapter xii. of their report the majority have dealt with the “intensive” form generally which martial law assumed and with certain specific instances of undue severity and of improper punishments or orders.  It is unnecessary to recapitulate the instances which the Committee have enumerated in detail in both their reports, nor would any useful purpose be served by attempting to assess, with a view to penalties, the culpability of individual officers who were responsible for these orders, but whose conduct in other respects may have been free from blame or actually commendable.  But His Majesty’s Government must express strong disapproval of these orders and punishments and ask me to leave to you the duty of seeing that this disapproval shall be unmistakably marked by censure or other action which seems to you necessary upon those who were responsible for them.  The instances cited by the Committee gave justifiable ground for the assertion that the administration of martial law in the Punjab was marred by a spirit which prompted—­not generally, but unfortunately not uncommonly—­the enforcement of punishments and orders calculated, if not intended to humiliate Indians as a race, to cause unwarranted inconvenience amounting on occasions to injustice, and to flout the standards of propriety and humanity, which the inhabitants not only of India in particular but of the civilised world in general have a right to demand of those set in authority over them.  It is a matter for regret that, notwithstanding the conduct of the majority, there should have been some officers in the Punjab who appear to have overlooked the fact that they were administering martial law, not in order to subdue the population of a hostile country temporarily occupied as an act of war, but in order to deal promptly with those who had disturbed the peace of a population owing allegiance to the King Emperor, and in the main profoundly loyal to that allegiance.

This clear enunciation of bed-rock principles and emphatic condemnation of many of the methods of repression used in the Punjab would have done more to reassure the public mind in India had the actual punishment inflicted on General Dyer and a few others been more commensurate with the gravity of the censure passed on their actions, and in any case it came far too late.  It came too late to stem the rising tide of Indian bitterness, intensified by many gross exaggerations and deliberate inventions, which lost all sense of proportion when the Extremists demanded Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s impeachment, though many responsible Indians had expressed their unabated confidence in him before he left the Punjab on the expiry of his term of office, just after the troubles, in terms more unstinted even than those in which the Government