Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 469

in the history of the process of development we have traced so far through our civilisation. Upon the party representing the cause of progress in Western history has now devolved the task of lifting this conflict toa higher stage than any it has yet reached —of carrying it into the arena of the economic process in all its manifestations throughout the world. Never before has that party had set before it a cause more calculated to inspire its inward faith, and to call forth all the qualities of a stern, controlled, centralised, and disciplined enthusiasm. Behind the struggle towards which we have advanced lies all the impetus of past development in our civilisation, all the meaning inherent in that civilisation from the beginning of our era. The gradual organisation and direction through the State, under the sense of responsibility here defined, of the activities of industry and production, moving slowly, not to any fixed condition of ordered ease, but towards an era of such free and efficient conflict of all natural forces as has never been in the world before, is no dream of excited imaginations. Divested of all the cruder proposals of confiscation and of the regimentation of society, divorced from the threats and not unnatural exaggerations of classes wronged and oppressed in the past, it is no more than a simple and sober reality of the future, which must, by necessity inherent in the evolutionary process, ultimately prevail amongst the winning peoples. It is the goal which has been inherent from the beginning in that organic process of development, the steps in the unfolding of which in our Western civilisation we have endeavoured to describe. It represents the only