Paine's mistake lay simply in using the word "natural" instead of the word "moral." To assert that a man has a natural right to control his own government is to assert what is demonstrably false. To assert that a man has a moral right to control his own government is to assert simply that in the writer's opinion a man ought to be allowed to control his own government, and the dispute is simply about a particular problem of ethics. Substitute the one word for the other in the passage above quoted, and what is now a false statement of fact becomes a reasonable, if not an unanswerable, argument. The quarrel between Paine and Burke, so far as it was a practical quarrel and not merely a quarrel about terms, was a quarrel about the precise manner in which certain common ethical principles should be enforced. Government is merely the organization of human beings for certain common purposes, and the structure is to be adapted solely to the execution of those purposes. If a particular scheme means the abuse of one section of the community by another, one of the ends of government, the protection of all the human beings concerned, is not achieved, and the scheme, if possible, should be altered. Once we come to the conclusion, upon ethical principles, that every human being ought to have an equal chance with every other of developing himself, it follows, not as a logical deduction, but simply as a matter of practical convenience, that one class ought not to be entrusted with the control of {115} others. A constitution in itself has no merit. Its only value is as a piece of working machinery, and it is to be tested not by the degree of its conformity to abstract principles, but by its practical effects.