Principles of western civilisation

XI ’ TOWARDS THE FUTURE 461

It is only by the conscious conversion to a sense of responsibility transcending the claims of all present interests of the only power able in the economic process to hold the stage in the present that the new order of society can be born into the world. There is only one conceivable condition in which this result can be accomplished :—The consciousness of society, expressing itself through the State, but here also in obedience to a sense of responsibility rising superior to all the interests within the limits of the State, must, in the economic process also, hold the stage free and open in the present during the epoch in which it has become the destiny of the present to pass under the control of the future.

As we reflect on the principle which here gradually becomes visible, its full meaning grows, in time, upon the mind. We begin to see in perspective the real outlines of that development with the tendencies of which the advanced peoples have already been struggling for the greater part ofa century. Sooner or later, we see, the general will must, by its own determinative act, and in obedience to that sense of responsibility inherent ‘n our civilisation, and transcending the bounds of all existing interests and the limits of political consciousness itself, project the meaning of the economic process beyond the content of that mere free fight in the present to which we see it now confned. Itis, inreality, we begin to perceive, nothing more than the dim consciousness of this fact that has consistently inspired that movement of opinion which, under so many forms, has already come into conflict with the phenomena of J/azssez-farre competition in the economic process throughout the