What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables (1946, 2nd ed), pp. 238–40.
It was said by Campbell Bannerman in the course of a debate in the House of Commons on Ireland, that self-government is better than good government. The statement had become so popular in India that it had become more than a mere slogan. It had become a maxim.1Gandhi remarks, for example, in Young India (22 September 1920): “For me the only training in swaraj we need is the ability to defend ourselves against the whole world and to live our natural life in perfect freedom even though it may be full of defects. Good government is no substitute for self-government. The Afghans have a bad Government but it is self-Government. I envy them.” In The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 18 (Jul to Nov 1920), pp. 270–71. As it stands the statement is quite absurd. Campbell Bannerman was not contrasting self-government with good government. He was contrasting self-government with efficient government or rather with “resolute government” to use the phrase of his opponent Lord Salisbury.[]
There is no denying that self-government must be good government, otherwise it is not worth having. The question is, how is good government to be had. Some people seem to be under the impression that as self-government is a sovereign government it is bound to result in good government. This is one of the greatest delusions from which most people in dependent countries are suffering.
Those who are living in such a delusion had better read what Prof. Dicey has to say on this point. Discussing the question what persons and bodies with full
sovereign powers can do Dicey has the following observations to make:
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 abolish Mahomedanism. Louis the Fourteenth at the height of his power could revoke the Edict of Nantes, but he would have found it impossible to establish the supremacy of Protestantism, and for the same reason which prevented James the Second from establishing the supremacy of Roman Catholicism . . . What is true of the power of a despot or of the authority of a constituent assembly is specially true of the sovereignty of Parliament; it is limited on every side by the possibility of popular resistance. Parliament might legally tax the Colonies; Parliament might without any breach of law change the succession to the throne or abolish the monarchy ; but everyone knows that in the present state of the world the British Parliament will do none of these things. In each case widespread resistance would result from legislation which though legally valid, is in fact beyond the stretch of Parliamentary power.
There is an internal limit to the exercise of sovereign power itself. Even a despot exercises his powers in accordance with his character, which is itself moulded by the circumstances under which he lives, including under that head the moral feelings of the time and the society to which he belongs. The Sultan could not if he would, change the religion of the Mahommedan world, but if he could do so it is in the very highest degree improbable that the head of Mahommedanism should wish to overthrow the religion of Mahomet; the internal check on the exercise of the Sultan’s power is at least as strong as the external limitation. People sometimes ask the idle question why the Pope does not introduce this or that reform? The true answer is that a revolutionist is not the kind of man who becomes a Pope and that the man who becomes a Pope has no wish to be a revolutionist . . .2A. V. Dicey, Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885), pp. 70–74. See also Annihilation of Caste, BAWS 1, p. 70.
I have already pointed out that it is not enough for the servile classes to be content with the mere fact that their country has become an independent and a sovereign state. It is necessary for them to go further and to find out who are likely to be the instruments of the State, in other words who is going to be the governing class. Dicey’s observations and the profound truth which underlies them no one can question — add a further point namely that for good government, ability and efficiency of the governing class are not enough. What is necessary is to have in the governing class the will to do good or to use Dicey’s language, freedom from internal limitations arising out of selfish class interests. Efficiency combined with selfish class interests instead of producing good government is far more likely to become a mere engine of suppression of the servile classes.