Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 413

ing meaning of the social process as a whole ;—but broken only in a struggle which, gradually extending outwards from the relations of labour to capital, into the domain of industry, of business, of commerce, and of international relations, must in time consciously involve in its reach all the tendencies of the world-process in Western history.

The entire movement represented by modern socialism is in this respect to be regarded as bearin a close analogy to the Renaissance of the Middle Ages which preceded the upheaval out of which was to arise a new governing principle of the evolutionary process. All its faults and failings notwithstanding; far as its leaders have sometimes wandered from the meaning of our era; completely as many of those leaders have missed, as did the leaders of the Italian Renaissance, the essential meaning of the great antinomy represented in the evolution of our Western world; the movement, nevertheless, represents in a true sense a general revolt of the consciousness of our time against economic conditions tending towards absolutism in which the characteristic principle that our civilisation represents in the evolutionary process is as yet inoperative. In it there is expressed, in effect, the first general effort of the masses of the world to impose on the economic conditions represented by the early crude conceptions of the competitive era that distinctive meaning which the social process as a whole is destined, sooner or later, to acquire in our civilisation.

As we look, therefore, at the fate which appears to be overtaking the advocates of that development in thought which received its principal impetus from the Manchester school in England, the re-