Note on Visit to Sabarmati Ashram
The struggle for suffrage only ended with the right to vote. Segregation only began to be addressed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the US, with the end of apartheid in South Africa. Each struggle ended, and another one began.
In no case are these problems truly solved, but they can only be addressed as part of a campaign of continuous struggle. Slavery still exists in our world. The U.S. claims universal suffrage, yet the poll tax has now been replaced by discriminatory voter identification laws that do nothing to mitigate the nonexistent issue of voter fraud, but serving only to actively discourage people from voting.
While we can never make our world perfect, while we will always find one evil supplanted by another, we must use the tools we have, and the most powerful of those is the rule of law. In a democratic society, we own our government. We as a people define our rules and our obligations. While our governments too often appear distant and uncaring (and too often they are in fact distant and uncaring), it is when we reclaim our ownership and invoke the rule of law that real change can begin to occur.
There are three principles to the rule of law. The first is that the law shall be written down in advance, that we do not make up the law as we go along or look back in time and declare actions to be retrospectively illegal. This is the principle that John Adams so eloquently stated when he said we are an empire of laws, not a nation of men.
The second principle is that the laws shall be made public. In a world where ignorance of the law is no excuse, this principle seems obvious and easy, but I have come to learn through hard experience that this requirement of promulgation has all too often been practiced in the breach.
The first two principles, writing down and then publishing the law, are necessary but not sufficient. One can have a law stating that people of color may not eat at white lunch counters in the American south, and one can make that requirement widely known, satisfying both of those principles, This is only rule by law, not yet the rule of law.
The third principle is that laws shall be general, they shall not apply only to one person or one group. Saying that “Indians and Asiatics” must register themselves, pay a one pound registration tax and carry their registration papers at all times, is a fundamental violation of the rule of law that Gandhi fought in his satyagraha in South Africa.
25
