And what have we here?

Early drafts of Two Treatises from Mr Locke, written in the shadow - or shall we call it, a sunrise - of England's Glorious Revolution. In the first we assess the viability of parley-a-ments, as he scans the empty chamber of a state which would claim to be his heir, until Mr Reagan established the glory of forgetfulness, and Mr Bush accomplished his warfare by declaring the end of history.

In the second we adore the perfection of the parley-a-mentary principle in the façade of its international reductio ad absurdum in New York - a construction chosen to adopt the International Style by excluding the architects who invented it, Mies and Gropius. How coherently the democratic principle reveals itself in the flux of the looking glass.

Government is everywhere antecedent to records, and letters seldom come in amongst a people, till a long continuation of civil society .. And then [the people] begin to look after the history of their founders, and search into their original, when they have outlived the memory of it.




We apologise to our readers in Australia, who have had to get through their April Fool's Day without benefit of our truant publication.












John Locke
Second Treatise on Government
  VIII Of the beginning
  of political societies
1690
Regnery, 1962©