efficient government

The underlying cause of the demand of voice in politics was thus not so much the principle of liberty as the desire for efficient government. Theories of right and wrong, of divine ordination or the innate equality of men, formed the rallying cries, the symbols for which men died with profound sincerity, a king of England by the axe no less than an Austrian peasant on the wheel. But success or failure in the end depends on the efficiency of the administrative machine. Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right, rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong. Representative government in Bohemia failed because it was signally worse managed than the despotism it replaced, and the Stewarts fell not because Divine Right was unsound, but because their government was incompetent.

—C. V. Wedgwood, The thirty Years War

italics are mine - vs