Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/168

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2. Your Petitioners are many of them registered as electors duly qualified to vote at the election of members to your Honourable Council and Assembly.

3. Your Petitioners have read with feelings of unfeigned regret and alarm the debate as reported in the newspapers on the second reading of the Franchise Law Amendment Bill.

4. Your Petitioners, with the greatest deference to your Honourable House, beg to dissent entirely from the views of the various speakers, and feel constrained to say that the real facts fail to support the reasons adduced in justification of the passing of the unfortunate measure.

5. The reasons, as reported in the newspapers, brought forward in support of the measure, your Petitioners understand, are:
 * (a) that the Indians have never exercised the franchise in the land they come from;
 * (b) that they are not fit for the exercise of the franchise.

6. Your Petitioners respectfully beg to press on the notice of the Honourable Members that all the facts and history point the other way.

7. The Indian nation has known, and has exercised, the power of election from times far prior to the time when the Anglo-Saxon races first became acquainted with the principles of representation.

8 . In support of the above, your Petitioners beg to draw the attention of your Honourable Assembly to Sir Henry Sumner Maine's Village Communities, where he has most clearly pointed out that the Indian races have been familiar with representative institutions almost from time immemorial. That eminent lawyer and writer has shown that the Teutonic Mark was hardly so well organized or so essentially representative as an Indian village community until the precise technical Roman form was engrafted upon it.

9. Mr. Chisolm Anstey, in a speech delivered before the East India Association in London, said:


 * We are apt to forget in this country, when we talk of preparing people in the East by education and all that sort of thing for Municipal Government and Parliamentary Government, that the East is the parent of Municipalities. Local Self-government, in the widest acceptation