ABSTRACT
The distinctive task of our age is not to extend scientific achievement but to improve the regulative mechanism of government in its widest sense.’ With these words my predecessor in this chair concluded his Alfred Marshall lectures at Cambridge in 1933 upon The Framework of an Ordered Society. Sir Arthur Salter’s training and experience had led him to an understanding of the nature of government more surely than the traditional training of a professor might have done. He had been a distinguished civil servant-but not merely a British civil servant, for he had entered as a pioneer into the field, first of Allied, and then of international administration. And his civil service experience, national and international, had not been confined to the sphere of politics narrowly understood; the principal problems with which he had been concerned were economic. Nor was his experience confined to governmental or intergovernmental administration. He had proved himself an impartial and successful conciliator in disputes arising in the world of trade and industry —I name only his chairmanship of the Road and Rail Conference in 1932.
