ABSTRACT
It has become almost a commonplace that we have reached a critical epoch in the history of representative government. Certainly no man would now claim that the large aspirations of those who, with Bentham and the radicals, fought the great battle of parliamentary reform in the early part of the nineteenth century have been to any adequate degree fulfilled.1 They are, indeed, different; for the direction taken by political activities in the last fifty years has been almost antithetic to that which he would have approved. The English state has become a positive state; by which is meant that instead of trusting to the interplay of possibly conflicting self-interests for the realization of good, it has embarked upon an effort, for some time at least to come, definitive, to control the national life by governmental regulation….
