The probability of a disturbance was foreseen by the authorities, and Mr. Gell took various precautions to circumscribe the area of the outbreak. British regiments, Indian infantry and cavalry were held in readiness; a barricade was erected on Mayo road leading to the High Court; several officials and non-officials were appointed Special Magistrates and were posted at important points to watch the progress of events, assist the police, and take all feasible measures for securing the peace of the City. The Special Magistrates were a curiously mixed body. Among them were Mr. James Macdonald, a sexagenarian Scotsman, who had served the City for years as a member of the Municipal Corporation; Colonel Cordue, R. E., the Master of the Mint; Mr. Philip Messent, Engineer of the Port Trust; Mr. Arthur Leslie of Messrs. Greaves, Cotton and Co., who filled his pockets with lemon-grass oil for the benefit of the men of the Royal Scots, who were posted at the old police _chauki_ in Jacob’s Circle and had their bare knees badly bitten by the mosquitoes and other forms of low life which shared the _chauki_ with the police-constables; the author of this work, who was at the time enjoying a spell of comparative ease in the literary backwaters of the Bombay City Gazetteer; and last but not least, the Hon. Arthur Hill-Trevor, a commercial free-lance and honorary magistrate, who regarded himself as a sort of Honorary and Supernumerary Deputy Commissioner of Police, and in that capacity executed various blood-curdling manœuvres which caused no little apprehension to his more pacific colleagues. It so happened that some of the precautions proved superfluous. There was no attempt on the part of the rioters to rush the High Court or even to attend the trial of Tilak: there was no organized attempt to march on the European residential quarter or to attack the European population _en masse_. Although the rioting assumed at times a very threatening character, it was confined wholly to the mill-area, except on one afternoon, when the Bania merchants, employed in the cloth-market of the C division, turned out in force and had to be dispersed by firing. A consideration of all the circumstances of the Tilak riots leads one to infer that the Commissioner was not as well served by his detective agency as he might have been, and that the disturbances might have been more disastrous and have lasted longer, if Tilak’s emissaries and agents had had more time at their disposal in which to foster the spirit of violence. By the end of the first day’s rioting it was clear that outlying areas like the Fort and Malabar Hill were exposed to no danger, and consequently most of the Special Magistrates gravitated from their original posts to Jacob’s Circle, which divided the industrial quarters from the central portion of the City and served as a gathering-ground for the forces of law and order.