26 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
yourselves to those protests and appeals against our conduct in the cases specified, that you may deem it your duty to make, as any other conduct must, for reasons already stated, prove deeply injurious to the public interests, and can, under the resolution taken and avowed by Government, produce no result favourable either to the immediate or future establishment of the extended jurisdiction you have claimed. A very short period will elapse before an answer is received to the full and urgent reference we have made upon this subject; and we must again express our hope, that even the obligations under which we are sensible to act, are not so imperative as to impel you to proceedings which the Government has thus explicitly stated its resolution to oppose.
“We have the honour to be, etc. etc.”
The petition then stated, that on Monday the 6th October instant, the Supreme Court being assembled for the despatch of its judicial business, Sir C. H. Chambers caused this letter to be read to the court by the clerk of the Crown; after which the petitioner concurring with Sir C. H. Chambers in opinion regarding both the form and the substance of the communication, the court directed that the clerk of the Crown should inform the Chief Secretary to the Government of the Presidency, by letter, that the said letter had been received, and that the Judges could take no notice thereof.
That it was the intention of the said Sir C. H. Chambers and the petitioner to have laid before his Majesty, in an humble petition, the circumstances which were therein above set forth, and most dutifully and submissively have to be sought his Majesty’s royal protection against what they agreed in considering a most unconstitutional and criminal attempt, on the part of those armed with the whole power, civil and military, of the Presidency, to approach the Supreme Court of Judicature within the same, not by their humble petition, or by motion, by themselves or their counsel, in open court, the only way in which the law, for the wisest purposes, permitted his Majesty’s Judges to be addressed, but by means of such covert and private communication, as was strictly forbiden by the forms reared by the wisdom of ages, for the intrenching their persons against the danger and even the pollution of undue solicitation or menace, and this for the declared purpose of inducing the Judges, notwithstanding their most sacred