Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM I2T

of internal politics and of international relations expressed in a conception of business interests in the State; and the whole meaning of the social process in history summed up in the contemplation of the movement of the world towards an ideal in which laws and social arrangement shall at last bring the interests of society as a whole into harmony with the enlightened self-interest of all the individuals comprised within the limits of the existing political State. Similarly in the political philosophy of Mr. Spencer it is only the aspect of progress as a struggle between the present and the past that we have continually in sight. Of the larger and characteristic significance of the historical process in Western society as that of a struggle between the present and the future there is no perception. The meaning of the political development which has carried our civilisation towards the principles of Western Liberalism presents itself, therefore, to Mr. Spencer as capable of being all included, as we saw, in a mere theory according to which existing social interests are to be considered aS passing out from under the control of the past, towards an organisation of society in which a conciliation is to take place between the interests of each and the interests of all; and in which the interests of the present are to be at last ascendant and supreme in every particular.

As we look back at last, from the level of our own time, over the history of the nineteenth century, the interest in this remarkable development in Western thought culminates. Under a multitude of forms we see that the movement in social philosophy has, in reality, run its course as