Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WHAT IS GOVERNMENT FOR? THE saying of Edmund Burke, that a state is a " partnership in the arts and sciences, in every virtue and in all perfection," has until recent times been taken by the English-speaking race as mere literature. But it was prophecy. The real political revolution is not in the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the aristocrats, or of the proletarians over the middle class; it is in the triumph of the idea of the state as a working-partnership over the idea of the state as a sovereign power. The real revolution is a new orientation of the mind; it puts into the minds of the people a new conception of the meaning and end of government, a new idea of what the law is, and what it is for. The old regime, from which we are beginning to shake ourselves free, believed in the state as a sovereign power. This power had, in its development, two principal phases, as has been shown, with sun-clear lucidity, by Sir Henry Maine. It was first based upon caste or " status," and then upon contract or " the consent of the governed,"but in both cases government held itself aloof from the working world. Its law had no clear correspondence with the laws of art and science; it was not affected by technological considerations; it disregarded the engineering problem as to how best to raise the general standard of living and put the people in possession of the earth. On the contrary, it undertook to supplant the natural laws of evolution by legal conventionalities — first, the conventionalities of custom, then those of contract. Nobody questions that the systems of status were devoid of social enterprise; they rested frankly upon old habits. It has been supposed, however, that the advent of the " social contract " changed all that. But it did not. It did not break the sway of ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.