द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

254 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
by any name you like, a rose will smell as sweet by any other
name, but it must be the rose of liberty that I want and not
the artificial product.' Then in order to soften his demand
for independence he appealed in these words: 'I want to -
become a partner with the English people; but I want to
enjoy precisely the same liberty that your people enjoy and
I want to seek this partnership not merely for India and not
merely for mutual benefit.' Then finding that all appeals
were useless, he flared up and said: 'Will you not see the
writing that these terrorists are writing with their blood?'
And then he said: 'I shall hope against hope, I shall strain
every nerve to achieve an honourable settlement for my country.
... It can be a matter of no joy and comfort to me to lead
them again to a fight of that character, but if a further ordeal of
fire has to be our lot, I shall approach that with the greatest joy
and with the greatest consolation that I was doing what I felt
to be right, that the country was doing what it felt to be right.'
At the last sitting of the plenary session of the Round
Table Conference on December 1st, 1931, the Prime Minister,
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, made the following declaration:
'At the beginning of the year (1931) I made a declaration
of the policy of the then Government and I am authorised
by the present one to give you and India specific assurance
that it remains its policy. I shall repeat the salient sentences
of that declaration.
'The view of His Majesty's Government is that respon-
sibility for the Government of India should be placed upon
the Legislatures, Central and Provincial, with such pro-
visions as may be necessary to guarantee during the period
of transition the observance of certain obligations and to
meet other special circumstances and also with such
guarantees as are required by the minorities to protect their
political rights. In such statutory safeguards as may be
made for meeting the needs of the transitional period, it
will be the primary concern of His Majesty's Government
to see the reserved powers so framed and exercised as not
to prejudice the advance of India through the new Con-
stitution to full responsibility for her own Government.
'Regarding the Central Government it made it plain
that, subject to defined conditions, His Majesty's late