XV

THE JALLIANWALA CYCLE *

LIKE the medieval alchemist who spent his days in endeavouring to transmute the baser metals into gold, every lover of the good name of Great Britain will anxiously scan the parliamentary reports of the historic Amritsar debate in order to find what grains of virtue are residual in the retort, after the fumes of verbiage and passion have evaporated. Nothing of permanent value is to be gained by exaggeration or unbalanced language in either direction. Some gains there are from the Debate, and it is fair to compute and place them upon record.

In the first place, the doctrine of rule by terror in India has received a deathblow by the House of Commons vote. The protagonists of military force of teaching a lesson, of shooting some people pour encourager les autres, have brought their dogma, hideous, naked, and unashamed, before the Supreme Inquest of the nation, and it has there been defeated. Had Sir Edward Carson's motion been triumphant, then we say quite plainly that terrorism would have been England's official creed * Written after the Dyer Debate in the House of Commons.

and that it would have been decent and proper for India to have taken any and every usual step by which one nation seeks its severance from another. The British Committee of the Indian National Congress would logically have had to throw up the sponge, and there would have been no justification whatsoever for the continuance of the Congress Committee or the Congress organ. The triumph of Carson and the Dyerites would have been the winding-sheet of the connection. As we wrote recently, the exoneration of Dyer would have indicated the limit of India's forbearance. So far asand no further than it goes, the declaration of the Secretary of State for India, endorsed as it was subsequently by the Commons, may be definitely reckoned as an asset by India. The rejection of Dyer's case by the Cabinet, the Army Council, and the House is an indication that some sanity still lingers among our ruling classes.

It is a curious and, in a measure, a consoling consideration that the higher the authority that has dealt with Dyer the stronger has been the judgment against him. The Hunter Committee, as all remember, was ineptitude and feebleness personified-we allude to the Majority Report, of course--and its niggling and namby-pamby conclusions are the low

water mark of criticism upon Crawling Order Dyer. The high-water mark was reached by the Secretary of State for War. In fact, the Hunter Committee. obviously tempered the requirements of justice to its estimate of probable public opinion, and by so doing has earned for itself immeasurable and permanent contempt. The Government of India took a stronger view and concurred in the Indian Commander-in-Chief's removal of Crawling Order Dyer from his appointment, in the notification that he was omitted from further promotion by the Selection Board in India, and in fact that he was thus automatically placed upon half-pay. A telegram from the Commander-in-Chief of the India Office recommended that he should be retired from the Army. The head of the Army Council and Secretary of State for War (the Right Hon. W. S. Churchill) in the course of the debate indicated in the House his own decided opinion that the definite disciplinary act of Dyer's compulsory retirement would have been proper. Then why was it not done? The explanation of the Minister for War gives as a reason the virtual condonation of this man by his military superiors in India. The Army Council, and at a later stage the Cabinet, took a similar view. And here critical opinion

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must sharply part company with the course adopted by both these bodies as being virtual abdication of responsibility and function for fear of reversing the actions of their own military subordinate. With what sense of logic can Mr. Asquith so heavily censure the Civil Authorities in Amritsar for abandoning civil responsibilities when the supreme Civil Authority of the Empire allows the performance-even the admittedly meritorious performance of certain military operations by Crawling Order Dyer, and a very general conduct at Amritsar by his immediately official superiors, to outweigh their own supreme duty of reviewing and revising the whole situation, not omitting any measures of condonation or quasicondonation of his crimes? As the matter stands, Crawling order Dyer is broken. That we have upon the statement of his defence by his admirers. But the Cabinet and Army Council have crawled obsequiously down the lane marked for them by Sir Michael O'Dwyer. Dyer's dogmas and murders are repudiated. Sir Michael O'Dwyer approved and esteemed them correct. The action which the Army Council and the Cabinet would have liked to take they therefore say they cannot take. Sir Michael O'Dwyer is not merely the strong

now

man of the Punjab. He is the ultimate authority in the British Empire.

Thus the British Army List has to be disgraced by the inclusion of the name of Crawling Order Dyer, and the Indian taxpayer has to contine to be taxed to maintain him. The obloquy is Great Britain's.

All this we owe to a weak Secretary of State for India. Ever since the appointment of the glaringly inadequate Hunter Committee we have been forced to prophesy woe, and our prophecies have proved all too painfully true. It is all very well for him to repudiate terrorism in particular and concentrate opprobrium upon one head in particular. To put it bluntly, that saves himself. Herod had the head of John the Baptist on a charger for enunciating views as to the sanctity of marriage which did not commend themselves to the monarch. But who really was responsible for a greater offence, the Massacre of the Innocents? Unhesitatingly we affirm and shall continue to affirm, that while the present Secretary of State for India holds office his grovelling flattery of Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the ex-Lieutenant-Governor of the

Punjab, and of the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, mark him as either a hypocrite or a villain. No man, no