The activities of the states described in this book take their place in the great change of modern times from acquiescence to intervention. Faced with deprivation, disease, and untrammeled economic power the former counsel had been submission to the will of God; when it appeared that God had placed remedies in the hands of men, laws of nature had been discovered to curb action; when it appeared that economic ruin did not follow in the steps of government action it was revealed that “paternalism” undermined character. Self-regulation was claimed as the only remedy for the failures of an unregulated society, and this principle was applied to the complex working of a modern economy, to biological survival, and to individual moral character. In retrospect these themes can be seen as temporary defenses against the advance of the great rationalist principle that man was master of his world and could make of it what he wished, and the great principle of popular government that, in the long run, ends and means must be settled by representative government; but at the close of the nineteenth century they had been questioned rather than discredited. The walls had been breached but had not yet crumbled. Yet the current was surely set toward an era in which public responsibility for care of the unfortunate, for regulation of economic activity, and for control of the environment would be accepted as a matter of course.