Lord Chelmsford, be considered in all its logical implications, responsibility is laid at the door of the highest quarters. No personal vengeance upon mere minions like Dyer will satisfy either the mind or the dignity of the Congress. Speaking

for India, they censure Britain's highest agent in India. The complement to that is the correlative and tacit censure not only upon the Secretary of State who supported the Viceroy, but, higher still, upon the Cabinet, whose collective responsibility is grave, and ultimately upon the Prime Minister himself.

The psychology of Lord Chelmsford affords a parallel to that of Mr. Montagu. Repression before reform, order before elementary human liberty, was his watchword. From the moment the loathsome Bills were presented in draft, the wrong course was persistently steered in the Imperial Legislative Council, all protests and pleas for delay and investigation being ignored.

The Satyagraha movement, essentially the most spiritual, mildest and gentlest form of political resistance ever invented, was submerged in a flood of governmental violence. Delhi, Lahore, Gujranwala, Amrtisar, Kasur and other places unfolded the melancholy consequences, and the peaceful

meeting at Jallianwala Bagh became a blood-stained shambles. Humiliation after humiliation was being tamely suffered upon the North-West Frontier, but at Jallianwala at least the military gathered their laurels and inflicted some two thousand casualties upon an unarmed meeting.

And for all this kind of thing the Viceroy was giving a blank cheque. Again, as human memories are short, and forgetfulness is a fruitful mother of the wrong sort of charity, we quote from the "Pioneer Mail" of April 17, 1919, the following communique from the Viceroy: "It remains for the Governor-General in Council to assert in the clearest manner the intention of Government to prevent by means, however drastic, any recurrence of these excesses. He will not hesitate to employ the ample military resources at his disposal to suppress organised outrage, rioting, or concerted opposition to the maintenance of law and order, and has already sanctioned the application of the State Offences Regulation 1804 in a modified form to certain districts of the Punjab." The resolution later on states that the Governor-General in Council "will further use all preventive measures provided by the Statutes to check disorder at its source, and in Regulation III of 1818, and the corresponding

Regulations applicable to Bombay and Madras, and in the Rules under the Defence of India Act, he has powers which will enable him to deal effectively with those who promote disorder. He has sanctioned the extensions of the provisions of the Seditious Meetings Act to the districts of Lahore and Amritsar in the Punjab, and will authorise a similar extension to other areas in which Local Governments see reason to require it. Thẹ Police Act of 1861 enables a Local Government to quarter additional police on any locality which is guilty of organised offences against the public peace at the charge of the inhabitants, and to levy from the latter compensation for those who havę suffered from injury to their property. The Governor-General in Council will advise Local Governments to make a free use of these provisions when necessary."

Let those who consider Lord Chelmsford to be an amiable weakling predisposed by nature towards constitutionalism and reforms, ponder well the above drastic communique. Let them consider the line taken as to the appointment, personnel, and terms of reference of the Hunter Committee itself, to say nothing of its subsequent unfairness of procedure, so grave as to lead to its boycott by Nationalists.

Nor can the disgraceful Indemnity Act be forgotten. Let them be mindful of the long intrigue that concealed the truth about Amritsar for eight months from the British Parliament and people until the Liliputian Act was passed and the Moderates of India gulled into joyful acceptance of what is really next door to nothing.

The year has come full circle, and the anniversary of Amritsar has passed. The Hunter Report fastens the blame upon the mere tools, The Congress Report affixes it to the true perpetrator, that Governor-General in Council who issued the Prussian instructions we have cited. It is for the British people to act against Chelmsford and all his abettors, how high soever.

If Englishmen have not lost all sense of liberty, Amritsar will be the word that will open the British peoples' hearts and minds to the true needs of India, and will be the name to inspire devoted work for her freedom, unresting until it be utterly obtained, so that April may be to India as to the Ancients, the Month of Opening and Awakening to her true destiny.-April 16, 1920.

XII

THE FINDINGS OF THE HUNTER REPORT

(MAJORITY)

IT is to the credit of whatever is decent in the public life of great Britain that publication of the Hunter Report has been awaited with such intense anxiety. After prolonged delay-for, by now it has been before the India Council and the Cabinet for many weeks it has at last appeared. The delay makes the disappointment caused by the terms of its Majority Report all the harder to bear. The Report is so much white-wash; and its feeble censures, where it does censure, are in their futility almost as irritant in effect as the wholesale condonations of slaughter which make it one of the most shameful Governmental productions issued by any modern civilised Power.

The Majority Report is the unanimous production of the five European members of the CommitteeLord Hunter, Mr. G. C. Rankin, Mr. W. F. Rice, General Barrow and Mr. T. Smith. In arrangement it is an apparently intentional jumble of narrative, effects, analysis of statements, causes, and findings. If the object was to confuse the mind of the reader the authors may be congratulated upon success.