Principles of western civilisation

440 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Now the evolutionary significance of the characteristic development represented by the civilisation of our era consists, as we have seen, in raising the human process beyond the level of that struggle for existence in the present at which it had hitherto been conducted in the world. That is to Say, its tendency has been, in all the development which has succeeded the life of the ancient civilisations, to project the meaning of the social process altogether beyond the content of those lower qualities contributing merely to success and survival in a free fight, all the principles of which are bounded by the horizon of the present. This is the meaning, in the first phase of the existing competitive era, of that demand for the regulation of the conditions for the employment of women, of children, and of unskilled labour; of the cry for a living wage; and of the struggle for the standard of life. This is the meaning, also, in the second phase of that era, of the determination, now visibly rising throughout our civilisation, to subordinate the uncontrolled rivalry between aggregates of capital to the larger meaning of the social process as a whole. In all these facts we are, as it were, in the presence of the first phenomena which mark the conditions under which the development we have traced through the preceding chapters, in which the ascendency of the present in the evolutionary process is being gradually challenged throughout the whole range of human activities, begins to impinge, at last, upon the economic process in the modern world.

As, however, that current phase of the international economic process in which we are living reaches its final development in the conditions in

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