Page:Bal Gangadhar Tilak, his writings and speeches.djvu/346

         Home Rule

British administration in India. The King, the Cabinet, the Governor-general and the Secretary of State are all agreed that it is proper and legal for you to ask for Responsible Government, and, secondly, that it ought to be the goal of the British administration in India, but the statement is not as complete as we want it to be. We are told that this Responsible Government will be granted to you by steps which will be decided by the Bureaucracy and not by us. That is not the doctrine of self-determination of which they talk so much in Great Britain. The steps are to be determined by us and not by the present bureauoratic administrators. Self-determination means that one must fix upon these steps,that we must fix upon the time limit and that the matter should not be left to the sweet discretion of bureaucracy which after 150 years of rule have now just come to see what the goal of their administration should be. They worked in utter darkness till now groping in the way, and when the War broke out, and when it was found that the Empire was in a danger they began to see what the goal of their administration ought to be. We do not want to quarrel with them for that. The goal is there and it is no longer seditious to say that we want Home Rule and that Home Rule is our birthright. We are going to England to tell the British Democracy plainly that the question as to what the first step should be and what the time of granting full

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