NEWS OF THE WEEK.
WE have written elsewhere about the attitude assumed by Mr. Montagu in the Amritsar Debate on July 8th, and abnut what we deem must be the consequences of that attitude. Here we will deal with the Debate itself. Mr. Montagu's main contention was that General Dyer's action was to be condemned
because it partook of "frightfulness." General Dyer did something analogous to what was done by the Prussians in Belgium when they killed hostages and other innocent persons in order to strike terror into the heart of the population generally. They wanted to produce political and military results by sacrificing a certain number of innocent people. As Mr. Monte,gu argued, "if you agree to that, you justify everything that General Dyer did."
"Once you are entitled to have regard neither to the in- tentions nor to the conduct of a particular gathering, but to shoot and to go on shooting with all the horrors that were involved in order to teach somebody else a lesson, you are embarking on terrorism to which there is no end."
