Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 471

the conception of the State as an irresponsible and almost brainless Colossus, organised primarily, towards the end of securing men in possession of the gains they had obtained in an uncontrolled scramble for gain divorced from all sense of responsibility. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the peoples who have lived through this phase of the competitive process, and amongst whom such competition as has prevailed has achieved the highest results, will start towards the new era with a great advantage in their favour. For it must be expected that where the development in progress continues to be efficiently maintained, the new system will succeed the old, not by force or coercion, but by its own merits ; and, in conditions in which it will become the increasing function of an informed and centralised system of public opinion to hold continually before the general mind through all the phases of public activity—local, social, political, and international—the character of the prin-

the social question will probably be affected. For by the concentration of enormous business premises in the middle area it has become possible for a healthier residential zone to exist at closer distance to the centre,—a fact not without significance when the London County Council is at the present time paying enormous sums for sites for workmen’s dwellings miles from the centre of London. ‘The same urgent need for the correlation of information and the centralisation of intelligence is to be observed on every hand in England at the present day. In the construction of deep railway lines for London in narrow tubes, worked by heavy trains over short distances on the block system, the spectacle may be noted of great undertakings in progress, many of the features of which were out of date before the work had been begun, for want of a systematised study of developments taking place elsewhere in the world. Opportunities of this kind which are not taken at the flood in a people’s development cannot be recalled. No informed observer can fail now to see how the unintelligent regulations (some of which are still continued) made by an ignorant State under the unfruitful view of its duties which prevailed in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, lost to Great Britain the lead in the motor-car development, the conditions for which were ripe in England at least a quarter of a century earlier than anywhere else in the world.