Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM 99

a resistance as determined, as unhesitating, and as bloody as any of which history could furnish record. Nor can it be the claim of Democracy as a form of government. For we have only to reflect to see that peoples have lived, and still live, under Democracy as a form of government, while remaining separated by an immense interval from the spirit and the meaning of the civilisation represented by the advanced peoples of the present day. Nor can it be, in the last resort, the claim of nationality. For one of the most remarkable spectacles of the modern world is that of mere tribal or local egoisms which have expressed themselves under the forms of nationality, claiming, in this respect alone, the rights and tolerance of our civilisation. The inherent contradiction is, indeed, often painfully felt by the best-intentioned minds ; it being dimly perceived that, according to existing theories of nationality, all the interval of progress which divides the life of the highest civilisation from that of the lowest social state would have to be condemned; there being no single step in that interval whereby a higher form of social life had replaced a lower form, which could be justified under current conceptions of the rights of nationalities. )

On what, therefore, in the last resort, rests the claim of Western Liberalism? How has the movement towards Democracy, which it represents, come to be associated in history with interpretations which the evolutionist sees must be essentially superficial, and even utterly misrepresentative of the real meaning of the phenomenon we are regarding ?

Now, if we endeavour to regard Western Liberalism as any other natural phenomenon, and, therefore,