The Congress has sometimes been described as His Majesty's permanent Opposition; but the aim of the originators was to make it something less futile than a mere meeting of powerless critics; they certainly hoped that the plebiscites or resolutions of the Congress would eventually come to have a sovereign force and translate themselves almost automatically into laws. But they took no sufficient notice of the immense difference in the conditions of a struggle for popular rights which is introduced by the foreign character of the ruling caste. There can always be an accommodation between the contending factions or classes within the same nationality, even though the accommodation may not come till after a severe and even violent struggle, but when the ruling caste is a caste of foreigners, it is unlikely to give up its powers, on any lesser compulsion than the alternative of extinction and will often prefer extinction to surrender. Even when the Congress leaders discovered that the bureaucracy were implacable and irreconcilable, they did not lay their hands on the right source of strength. The bureaucracy in India is in itself weak and powerless; it subsists greatly by the acquiescence and support of the people, partly by the existence behind it of the strength of the British Empire. The Congress leaders saw only the second source of its strength and sought to cut it off by depriving the bureaucracy of the moral support of the British public. Their initial miscalculation pursued them. They forgot that the British justice to which they appealed was foreign justice, the justice of alien to alien, of self-satisfied and arrogant masters to discontented dependents with whom they have no bonds of blood, culture, religion or social life. Justice might be on their side, but nature and self-interest were against them. Therefore they failed. Page 775, Bande Mataram , volume 1, SABCL