to
show for itself as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one
world would be worth as much as the other.

And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is not the same. The
ascending is worth a lot more than the descending. Why? I leave you with
that conundrum. Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral
Progress.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book III, ch. 3.

Lecky, _History of European Morals_, ch. 1.

Spencer, _Data of Ethics_, ch. 13 to 14.

VII

PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT

A. E. ZIMMERN

When I was asked to speak to you on the subject of Progress in
Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject on which I have
reflected a good deal. But when I came to think over what I should say,
I saw that you had asked me for the impossible. For what is Government?
I do not know whether there are any here for whom Government means no
more than a policeman, or a ballot-box, or a list of office-holders. The
days of such shallow views are surely over. Government is the work of
ordering the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers all
the activities of men as members of a community--social, industrial, and
religious as well as political in the narrower sense. It is concerned,
as the ancients had it, with 'that which is public or common', what the
Greeks called [Greek: to koinon] and the Romans _res publica_. The Old
English translation of these classical terms is 'The Commonwealth' or
Common Weal; and I do not see that we can do better than adopt that
word, with its richness of traditional meaning and its happy association
of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern minds, of Wealth
and Welfare.

Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth or, in other words,
the record of the course of the common life of mankind in the world. It
is a theme which really underlies all the other subjects of discussion
at this week's meetings: for it is only the existence of the
Commonwealth and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life
of the individuals composing it, which have made possible the
achievements of mankind in the various separate fields of effort which
are claiming your attention. Lord Acton spent a lifetime collecting
material for a History of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it
would have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government or of the
Commonwealth would be nothing less. Such is the n