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 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."