Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to any objective standard, such as the amount of happiness existing in the world at successive dates. Suppose you were able to show that, up to date, the amount of happiness in the world has shown a steady increase until it has reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose that you were transferred to another planet where the conditions were the exact opposite: where the inhabitants ages ago started with the happiness we now possess, and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they are no happier than the human race was at the first stage of its career. Now add together the totals of happiness for both your worlds, the ascending world which starts with the minimum and ends with the maximum, the declining world which starts with the maximum and ends with the minimum. The grand totals in both cases are exactly the same. So far as the total result is concerned, the declining world has just as much 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.