Principles of western civilisation

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conditions in which the tyrannies of the present can be broken. They are the only conceivable conditions in which it is possible for the larger future to be born. Whatever we may think of them, they are the only ruling conditions which will be identified with the state of social order destined to prevail among the peoples to whom the future of the world belongs.

The peoples who hold the foremost place in the advancing ranks of our civilisation at the present day, are those who have won their way to right of place through the prolonged stress of the development in which these principles have been born into the world. That development itself has been the sequel to the earlier struggle, in which the same peoples won in the supreme stress of military selection their right of place as the only type able to hold the stage of the world during the long epoch in which it became the destiny of the present to pass under the control of the future. The ideal toward which they are carrying the world is that of a fair, open, and free rivalry of all the forces within the social consciousness—a rivalry in which the best organisations, the best methods, the best skill, the best abilities, the best government, and the best standards of action and of belief, shall have the right of universal opportunity.

This is the ideal which has been inherent in Western civilisation from the beginning of our era. It is an ideal which rests ultimately, as we have seen, on one principle, always in the background—the principle of tolerance held as an ultimate conviction of the religious consciousness. It is an ideal involving, therefore, an attitude towards the