As for the police chief, he thought that he had not done enough to protect Gandhi. ‘I am very sorry indeed,’ he wrote, ‘that I had not sufficient force at my back, to do that duty without inflicting upon you and yours, further degradation, by compelling you to escape the mob, in the disguise of one so very far beneath you.’ He trusted that Gandhi, ‘like our own Prophet, when placed under a similar trial, will forgive your accusers, for they know not what they did’.52
