Principles of western civilisation

462 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

world. This has been, it may be distinguished, the ultimate meaning of that instinct, however wrongly directed it may have been in its manifestations in the past, which has consistently insisted that it is only through the aid of the law that unskilled labour can ever be enfranchised in its relation to capital. This has been, we see, the meaning struggling towards expression in that continual appeal of labour to society to recognise its right to a minimum wage, to uphold its standards of life, and, generally, to enforce by law a class of claims representing in the last analysis nothing more than the first bare conditions of free competition in its relations to capital on the one hand and to its own kind on the other. It is the same instinct—that nothing else than the general will consciously acting under a sense of responsibility to principles transcending all the claims of existing competitors, and acting, therefore, in the interests of the process of our social evolution as a whole, can ever hold the stage open and free in the conditions in which we see modern industrial competition tending universally towards monopoly control—which is in reality behind all the demands, however crudely formulated as yet, that tend to bring us into view of an era in which increments in the profit ownership of the instruments and materials of production which are unearned in terms of social utility shall form part of a common inheritance to which the energies and abilities of the individual shall be applied in conditions tending towards equal economic opportunity. In no other condition, as we begin to see, can that characteristic significance of really free competition, towards which it has been from the beginning the