SELF-GOVERNMENT • DICTIONARY ONE.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

... of disaffection, what hope is there for free institutions in countries where kings and nobles and marshals and hereditary institutions and laws of primogeniture have existed for ages? Sir, when the masses of any people, inspired by the love of country, have demanded in modern times the right of self-government, they have been pointed to France with its revolution of 1798, to South America, where changing republics rise and disappear so rapidly that not ten men in this House can tell me their names, and also to Mexico. ...

— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes them equally impatient of systematic despotism and systematic good government: their ...

— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... we near the centers of population. But there is scarcely a village or hamlet where graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as gullible and helpless as the infatuated victims of bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived by professional crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self-government ...

— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... development stretch two paths: one is indicated by the condition of about three per cent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and French Senegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the other path, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has local self-government and native customs and might evolve, if undisturbed, a native culture along their own peculiar lines. A tenth of the land, sparsely settled, is being monopolized and held for whites to make an African Australia. To these ...

— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... ready to support him and, willingly or not, went back to the hall, where he yielded to everything that was proposed to him. Emparan was deposed and the first locally chosen government of Spanish America was established. The principle that the provinces of America possessed the right of self-government, since no general government ...

— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

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