Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 441

which the capitalist and trader have gone inside all frontiers to exploit all human conditions, while owning no responsibility and no principles save those contributing to success and survival in a free fight for private gain, the outlines of one of the most remarkable situations in history become rapidly filled in.

In the first phase of the modern competitive era in our civilisation, it was the conditions arising from the exploitation by capital, for private gain, of helpless and unskilled labour within the State, in a struggle which the Manchester school sought to divorce from all sense of social responsibility, and which was bound, therefore, to fall to the level of its lowest governing factor, that constituted the basis upon which the whole economic structure rested. So now, in the international phase of laissez - faire competition, the first fact which we encounter is this same phenomenon raised to its highest expression on the world-stage. It is the conditions arising from the exploitation of the less developed peoples of the human family in the same irresponsible and uncontrolled struggle for private profit, which tends now to confront us as the ruling fact in the prevailing economic situation throughout the modern world.

If we turn, first, to the consideration of this question in connection with the growth of the British empire, we have presented to us an extraordinary record. In the history of the expansion of that empire from the period at which the British peoples took over the responsibility for the government of the mismanaged commercial empire of the East India Company, down to the last phase of its