Principles of western civilisation

452 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

And in the resulting circumstances, the competitive exploitation of Chinese resources proceeds in an environment of international intrigue, of social squalor, and of moral outrage and degradation, almost without equal in history. This is the phase of the situation which is still with us.

And so the principle of /azssez-faire and nonresponsibility in the competitive process, ascending gradually from the relations of capital to labour through a range of economic phenomena of unparalleled significance in our time, passes in these conditions to its last expression in the international world-process. The whole of the phenomena we have been regarding are the features of a single development. They are all related to the fact of the ascendency of the present in the economic process. They are all expressions, moreover, of the fact that the struggle, the development of which we traced through Western history in the previous chapters, has projected itself at last into that process under all its aspects throughout the world. Under almost every condition of the economic life of the modern world, the forces and tyrannies which represent merely the present have now in turn become envisaged in conflict with the principles representing the future, as the development of which our civilisation is the seat, continues to slowly unfold itself in Western history. This is the nature of the situation that is outlined on the stage of our civilisation throughout the world. Into the meaning of the cosmic drama which underlies it, all the activities of the advanced peoples are destined to be drawn. And it is the peoples who are about to solve the resulting problem in