Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 467

through Western history, and amongst whom the principle of competition has already produced its most important results, there has been reached a period in which it has become the clear duty of the party representing the cause of progress to place before it the one central principle around which all the details of the main conflict in the local, political, social, and international life of our civilisation must in future be waged. This is, that in the relations of the individual to society the conditions which express the ascendency of the present in the economic process belong to an epoch of development beyond the meaning of which our civilisation must be considered to have definitely moved.

The fact through which the ascendency of the present continues to express itself in the economic process is everywhere the same. We have it in view under the phenomenon of the legalised enforcement, whether by individuals, or classes, or corporations, or sometimes even by whole peoples, of rights which do not correspond to an equivalent in social utility. This is the phenomenon which John Stuart Mill and the English Utilitarians had in view in their early attack on the institution of unearned increments. This is the phenomenon which, in the last analysis, we see Henry George endeavouring to combat in his denouncement of the monopoly ownership of natural utilities. This is the phenomenon with which we see Marx struggling in his theory of surplus value, so far as it is true—the phenomenon, that is to say, of the acquirement by capital of values in the produce of labour which represent monopoly rights not earned by capital in terms of