Principles of western civilisation

454 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

ness, cannot be mistaken. It consists in the fact that it is enabling the competitive process to be raised to its highest condition of efficiency by the emancipation of the future from the tyranny of all forces tending to become absolute within the horizon of the present. But in the economic process, as we have seen it under the prevailing conditions of competition, this is the principle which is entirely absent. In all the phases of /azssez-fatre competition we have been considering we are everywhere; in the last resort, simply in the presence of the conditions of a free fight, falling slowly throughout the world to the level of the qualities necessary to success and survival in a struggle of such a character. All the principles and meanings of the process are, therefore, still, as in the civilisations of the ancient world, bounded by the present. The distinctive and characteristic principle of the developmental process in the civilisation of our era is as yet unrepresented.

When, however, we turn to that other great body of advanced opinion which has left the theories of the Manchester school behind, that body of opinion, that is to say, which expresses itself in various forms throughout our civilisation under the phenomena of the socialist movement, we have a spectacle almost equally striking. If it be asked whence comes the strength of conviction which has supported this movement under all its phases, there can also be no doubt whatever as to what the reply must be. The characteristic instinct which is common to all the movements of thought which socialism has produced, however they may have mistaken the character of the evolutionary process in Western civilisation, may be readily