of India and the British Government conveyed their appreciation of his long and distinguished services—­services which assuredly no errors of judgment committed under great stress could be allowed to overshadow.  It came too late also to correct the effects of the panic that had taken possession of the European mind when it was still largely in ignorance of the actual facts.  For most Europeans had at once rushed to the conclusion that the outbreak in the Punjab, in which no single Sepoy ever took part, was or threatened to be a reproduction of the Mutiny.  In the first days, as a measure of precaution, European women and children had been hurriedly collected into places of refuge lest the horrible excesses perpetrated by the Indian mob at Amritsar might prove the prelude to a repetition of Cawnpore.  The hardships and anxiety they underwent and the murderous outrages actually committed on not a few Europeans moved most of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen to unmeasured resentment, and not until they gained at last a fuller knowledge of all the facts so long allowed to remain obscure did a gradual reaction set in against the belief which was genuinely entertained by most Europeans, non-official and official in India, and which spread from them to England, that General Dyer’s action and the rigours of martial law alone “saved India.”

What drove the iron into the soul of India more than the things actually done in the Punjab, for which many Indians admit the provocation, was the reluctance of her rulers to look them in the face, and the tardiness and half-heartedness of the atonement made for them.  Not till nearly half a year after the troubles had occurred did the Government of India announce the appointment of the Hunter Committee of Inquiry, and this announcement was coupled with the introduction of a Bill of Indemnity for all officers of Government engaged in their repression, which wore, in the eyes of Indians, however unreasonably, the appearance of an attempt to shelter them against the possible findings of the Committee.  Again nearly half a year passed before the report of the Committee was made public, and the bloom had already been taken off it for most Indians by the report of a Commission instituted on its own account by the Indian National Congress which, partisan and lurid as it was, never received full refutation, as the witnesses upon whose evidence it was based were, for technical reasons, not heard by the Hunter Committee.  The complete surrender of civil authority into military hands first at Amritsar, and then, under orders from Simla, at Lahore and elsewhere, was, as His Majesty’s Government afterwards acknowledged, a disastrous departure from the best traditions of the Indian Civil Service.  But, whatever the mistakes committed by the civil authority in the Punjab or by those charged with the administration of martial law in that province, there is above the Punjab the Government of India, and its plea of prolonged ignorance