WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A PLEA TO THE FOREIGNERS 213
servile classes do not care for social amelioration. The want and poverty which has been their lot is nothing to them as compared to the insult and indignity which they have to bear as a result of the vicious social order. Not bread but honour, is what they want. The question therefore is : Will the governing classes in India having captured the machinery of the State, undertake a programme for the reform of the social order as distinguished from a programme of social amelioration ?
The statement by Congressmen that Congress can do wonders if only India was a sovereign and an independent State, supposing that it is an honest aspiration and not mere propaganda, proceeds on the assumption that for a man to do what he wants, nothing more is necessary than power. Such a belief is not only pitiable but is really a dangerous illusion. Those who are inclined to cherish such an illusion forget that there are serious limitations on sovereignty, no matter how absolute it is. None has described these limitations in more telling language than Dicey. In his Law of the Constitution, he says:—
“The actual exercise of authority by any sovereign whatever, and notably by Parliament, is bounded or controlled by two limitations. Of these the one is an external, the other is an internal limitation.
“The external limit to the real power of a sovereign consists in the possibility or certainty that his subjects or a large number of them, will disobey or resist his laws.
“This limitation exists even under the most despotic monarchies. A Roman Emperor, or a French King during the middle of the eighteenth century, was (as is the Russian Czar at the present day) in strictness a “sovereign” in the legal sense of that term. He had absolute legislative authority. Any law made by him was binding, and there was no power in the empire or kingdom which could annul such law... But it would be an error to suppose that the most absolute ruler who ever existed could in reality make or change every law at his pleasure...
“The authority, that is to say, even of a despot, depends upon the readiness of his subjects or of some portion of his subjects to obey his behests; and this readiness to obey, must always be in reality limited. This is shown by the most notorious facts of history. None of the early Caesars could at their pleasure have subverted the worship of fundamental institutions of the Roman world,.. The Sultan could not