Principles of western civilisation

412 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

controlled competition, the struggle must, in the terms of Professor Adams’ example, sooner or later fall to the level of its governing denominator. The strongest competitive forces must in time eliminate all elements from the struggle but those contributing to success therein. In its relations to its own competitors capital must, by a principle inherent in the conditions from the beginning, tend by its very success to ultimately embody some colossal attitude of absolutism towards society. In the relations between capital and labour, where, in the struggle to secure the conditions of profit, capital is able to enforce against labour the right to withhold the conditions of existence, free competition cannot in the end prevail. The struggle must ultimately be regulated at the level of its governing denominator. Even if labour be comparatively successful in the struggle, through its collective expression in tradesunionism, it must tend, in self-defence, to embody a latent principle of passive resistance to the conditions of its own highest energy and productivity as tending to diminish employment. The ultimate conditions of free competition do not in reality exist. They cannot exist in such circumstances. On neither one side nor the other, is the distinctive meaning of the social process in our civilisation as yet represented.

As we look forward, therefore, to the future, the meaning of the process of transition, of which we are living in but the opening phases, begins to grow upon the imagination. For we see that the development now in progress in the world is but the beginning of a general movement, in which this early conception of the principles of free competition is destined in turn to be slowly broken to the overrul-