The Urantia Book

70. The Evolution of Human Government

12. Allocation of Civil Authority

^70.12.1 The great struggle in the evolution of government has concerned the concentration of power. The universe administrators have learned from experience that the evolutionary peoples on the inhabited worlds are best regulated by the representative type of civil government when there is maintained proper balance of power between the well-co-ordinated executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

^70.12.2 While primitive authority was based on strength, physical power, the ideal government is the representative system wherein leadership is based on ability, but in the days of barbarism there was entirely too much war to permit representative government to function effectively. In the long struggle between division of authority and unity of command, the dictator won. The early and diffuse powers of the primitive council of elders were gradually concentrated in the person of the absolute monarch. After the arrival of real kings the groups of elders persisted as quasi-legislative-judicial advisory bodies; later on, legislatures of co-ordinate status made their appearance, and eventually supreme courts of adjudication were established separate from the legislatures.

^70.12.3 The king was the executor of the mores, the original or unwritten law. Later he enforced the legislative enactments, the crystallization of public opinion. A popular assembly as an expression of public opinion, though slow in appearing, marked a great social advance.

^70.12.4 The early kings were greatly restricted by the mores - by tradition or public opinion. In recent times some Urantia nations have codified these mores into documentary bases for government.

^70.12.5 Urantia mortals are entitled to liberty; they should create their systems of government; they should adopt their constitutions or other charters of civil authority and administrative procedure. And having done this, they should select their most competent and worthy fellows as chief executives. For representatives in the legislative branch they should elect only those who are qualified intellectually and morally to fulfill such sacred responsibilities. As judges of their high and supreme tribunals only those who are endowed with natural ability and who have been made wise by replete experience should be chosen.

^70.12.6 If men would maintain their freedom, they must, after having chosen their charter of liberty, provide for its wise, intelligent, and fearless interpretation to the end that there may be prevented:

^70.12.7 1. Usurpation of unwarranted power by either the executive or legislative branches.

^70.12.8 2. Machinations of ignorant and superstitious agitators.

^70.12.9 3. Retardation of scientific progress.

^70.12.10 4. Stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity.

^70.12.11 5. Domination by vicious minorities.

^70.12.12 6. Control by ambitious and clever would-be dictators.

^70.12.13 7. Disastrous disruption of panics.

^70.12.14 8. Exploitation by the unscrupulous.

^70.12.15 9. Taxation enslavement of the citizenry by the state.

^70.12.16 10. Failure of social and economic fairness.

^70.12.17 11. Union of church and state.

^70.12.18 12. Loss of personal liberty.

^70.12.19 These are the purposes and aims of constitutional tribunals acting as governors upon the engines of representative government on an evolutionary world.

^70.12.20 Mankind's struggle to perfect government on Urantia has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever-changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise. While there is a divine and ideal form of government, such cannot be revealed but must be slowly and laboriously discovered by the men and women of each planet throughout the universes of time and space.

^70.12.21 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]