Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 447

formed the same task in the same time and with the same ease.” *

The concluding remarks here quoted may be in all respects true. There may, indeed, be no other body of work-folk in the world who could have performed the task here described with the same ease and in the same way. But as the mind gradually takes in all that this typical scene really implies; as there is passed before it the history of that long struggle, described in the preceding chapters, with which the meaning of our civilisation is identified ; as there is recalled before it the character of the evolutionary process in which the emancipating principles have been born into the world that have gradually raised the position of woman above the animal conditions here implied ; as there is presented to the imagination even the last phases, still with us in England and America, of that tremendous struggle in which the standards of existence for labour have been lifted with such prolonged, determined, and devoted effort to even the comparatively low level they have so far attained; there grows upon it an Overmastering sense of the essential shallowness and immaturity in relation to the deeper life-processes of our civilisation of that entire view of the Manchester school, which sought to divorce all sense of responsibility from the results reached in national and international trade and production in obedience to their own inherent tendencies. We begin, in short, to have some sense of the real nature of the problem which overshadows the consciousness of Western Democracy, as it sees the international process in trade and industry

+ “Impressions of Japan,” Zhe Century, vol. Ixi. 5.