Principles of western civilisation

444 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

And yet, on the other hand, as the foremost representative in Western history of a still deeper principle involved in our civilisation from the beginning, and, therefore, in obedience to a sense of responsibility from which it found that it was in the last resort impossible to escape, building up, even by the very mechanism of the superficial theory of repudiation itself, that empire without parallel or precedent in history, which in the Opening year of the twentieth century had come to embrace a third of the entire population of the world.

As we follow within the frontiers of the empire the course of the same development, in which we see a universal process of exploitation in trade falling gradually to the level of its lowest factor under the ruling principle of non-responsibility, the results are hardly less striking. It is nowadays a matter of common knowledge, that in one of the modern phases of the development proceeding throughout the world British capital exhibits a tendency to migrate from the irksomeness in England of the State regulation of the factory system, of the living wage, and of that rising standard of life for labour which has marked the impingement upon the economic process of the vast development we have traced through Western history in the preceding chapters. British capital, for instance, has endeavoured to establish itself in India, to take from Lancashire its trade in cottons with China, by the competition of Indian mills, worked by cheaper labour in India under standards of life separated by an immense interval of development from those so hardly won in England. As