SELF-GOVERNMENT • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Self-government

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/sˈɛlfgˈəvərnmənt/ Listen

noun

Self-government n.

The act of governing one's self, or the state of being governed by one's self; self-control; self-command.

Hence, government of a community, state, or nation by the joint action of the mass of people constituting such a civil body; also, the state of being so governed; democratic government; democracy. "It is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the councels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be."

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Etymology of 'Self-government'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Self-government" Quotes from Famous Books

... merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was ...

— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... politics. The outline of the present situation in India is that we have been disseminating ideas of abstract political right, and the germs of representative institutions, among a people that had for centuries been governed autocratically, and in a country where local liberties and habits of self-government had been long obliterated or had never existed. At the same time we have been spreading modern education broadcast throughout the land, where, before English rule, learning had not advanced beyond the stage of Europe in the middle ages. These may be taken to be the primary causes of the existing ...

— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... be blamed if they act as if they had to do with swindlers?—is it not the mere instinct of preservation which makes them do it? These make women what they are. And your 'honourable men,' the most loyal of them, (for instance) is it not a rule with them (unless when taken unaware through a want of self-government) to force a woman (trying all means) to force a woman to stand committed in her affections ... (they with their feet lifted all the time to trample on her for want of delicacy) before they risk the pin-prick to their own personal pitiful vanities? Oh—to see how these things are ...

— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... for freedom of opinion, like the case for self-government, has suffered from the fact that we take the theory so completely for granted that we do not notice how far we are removed from the practice of it. Freedom is supposed to be an Englishman's speciality. "Britons never shall be slaves," we say, and suppose that settles ...

— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... moved its omission. He was answered by the PRIME MINISTER, who declared that no Irishman would now be content with the Act of 1914, and defended the present Bill on the curious ground that it gave Ireland as much self-government as Scotland had ever asked for. Sir EDWARD CARSON'S plea that it was a case of "this Bill or an Irish Republic" was probably more convincing. In a series of divisions the "Wee Frees" never mustered more than seventeen votes. The ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various

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