Principles of western civilisation

468 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

function. It is the phenomenon we have in view in that class of fortunes accumulated in stock exchange values which have not been earned in terms of function. It is the fact underlying every form of private right accruing from increase, unearned in terms of social utility, in the profit ownership of the instruments and materials of production. It is the phenomenon we have in view in the now universal tendency in modern industry to monopoly ownership, or its equivalent in monopoly control; with the resulting accumulation of vast private fortunes through the enforced disadvantage of classes, of whole communities, and even of entire nations. It is the fact underlying every form of the exploitation of a less developed people, whether by special tariffs or otherwise, by a ruling race for its own private advantage. And last of all, it is the phenomenon which meets us in its final colossal phase in the international world-process, under the tendency of aggregates of capital, in an uncontrolled and irresponsible scramble for profit governed in the last resort simply by the qualities contributing to success and survival in a free fight for private gain, to control the general exploitation of the natural resources of the world at the level of its lowest standards in human life and human labour. These are all but differing expressions of a single world-embracing fact—the ascendency of the present in the economic process in our time. It has been the conflict in which this ascendency of the present in the evolutionary process has been challenged, shaken, and overthrown in the developments of thought and action that have led up to the struggle now before us, which has formed the central theme