Principles of western civilisation

404 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

is not upon these things, regarded by themselves, that we must fix attention in considering the future. It is upon the meaning of the evolutionary process as a whole that the mind must continue to be concentrated. If we look back over the first period of the competitive era in Western history, particularly in England and the United States, where its phases have reached the most advanced development, we have in sight a spectacle of extreme interest. We have before us in this period the phenomena of an epoch in which the advocates of the principle ofan uncontrolled play of forces in the State have first risen to the position of clearly perceiving the enormous importance in the modern world-process of the principle of free competition. Nevertheless, what we see is that here, just as in the earlier phases of the evolutionary process in Western history in which the ascendency of the present was first challenged, the insight of the leaders of the time has carried them up to a fixed point, and no further. The advocates of an uncontrolled play of forces in society are, we See, everywhere, as yet, regarding as the dominant principle of the social process, nothing more than a condition of competition in which the action of every individual is supposed to proceed from the stand-point of his own enlightened selfinterest within the limits of political consciousness. In all the early literature of the competitive movement in England and the United States it is the glorification of the principle of free-competition within these limits which is always in evidence. The absolute potency of the uncontrolled action of the competitive forces in such circumstances