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to my justification for accepting the office of Minister. The cry was raised, by a section of the Extremist Press, that I should not have accepted ministerial office; and it was employed by Mr. C. R. Das in his electioneering campaign against me. The head and front my offence was that I was a member of the Government. To that I have a reply as conclusive as any that can be found in the armoury of controversy. For self-government, step by step, stage by stage, I have worked through life. I worked for it when really nobody in India dreamt of it, when the country was content to work in the old ways and was satisfied with the old institutions. I worked for it when the Government treated it as a fantastic dream. In the Imperial Legislative Council, only ten years ago, I was described as an impatient idealist, in this very connexion, by my lamented friend, Sir William Meyer, who was then Finance Minister. Our efforts, persistent and strenuous, have changed all this and even the view-point of the Government. The message of August 20 is a tribute to our success. We were now invited to co- operate and to join hands with the Government, in order to ensure the success of the very thing for which we had been fighting for nearly half a century, to raise in our midst the temple of self- government, which would efface all distinctions and all inequalities and be for all time to come the symbol of our equal status with the free nations of the earth. Should we have rejected this offer, which we believed to be genuine and sincere? I have no hesitation in saying that it would have been unwise, unpatriotic, almost treache- rous to do so. Therefore, in all sincerity and singleness of heart, which even the voice of slander will not be able to cloud, did I join the Government in a ministerial position. The familiar trick is to urge that we have changed. It is not we who have changed, but the Government, which, according to its lights, is adapting itself to the rapidly progressive tendencies of modern India. The point of differ- ence between us and the Government is that it is not moving fast enough to meet the progressive requirements of the country or the growing aspirations of the people.