“A Fair Country” - part 2
Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.
It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867. The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.
A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia. Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’. __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)