nd great branch of our subject--the progress
of mankind in the art of living together in the world.

Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social life of man: for
the principles that regulate human association are inherent in the
nature of man. But in what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves
mainly to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is to
the recognized and authoritative form of human association called the
State, as opposed to the innumerable subordinate or voluntary bodies and
relationships, which pervade every department of man's common life.

The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the
deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be
reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character.
The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all
social activity--let us never forget it--is liberty, to set free the
life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the
ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever
attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is
itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good
public administration that it is required but for security in the
pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private
life.'[60] Government is needed in order to enable human life to become,
not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and
Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen
believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the
human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system
based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government
acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the
highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a
slave, or a man living under a servile political system, may develop
many fine qualities of character: yet such virtues will, in Milton's
words, be but 'fugitive and cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'.
For liberty, and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school
of character and the appointed means by which men can best serve their
neighbours. A man deprived of such opportunities, cut off from the
quickening influence of responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago
'lost half his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave soldier, a
dil