Principles of western civilisation

134 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP. IV

day behind the social question in England and the United States alike, is one which waits for the scientific imagination of the historian of the future to do full justice to it. It is that of the hosts of the great army of progress which has fought the hardwon battles of Liberalism in the past, of that army upon which rest the sole hope and promise of Western Liberalism in the future, of that cause whose very life in the past has been the inner knowledge that the meaning of Liberalism is, in the last resort, the meaning of that system of life which has come down in Western history from the beginning of our erastanding grim, silent, scornful, before the professors who know only the materialistic interpretation of history. It is an army which moves not. Restive, sullen, majestic, it waits for the restatement of its faith in other terms.