Principles of western civilisation

142 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

always the future which is of most importance. It is, therefore, the social systems in which, other things being equal, conditions prevail which are favourable to the interests of the majority which is always in the future, rather than to the interests of that comparatively small minority of individuals which is in the present, which must in the end constitute the winning types. There must, that is to say, inevitably arise in the evolution of society a second stage in which the future will begin to control the present, a stage at which, under the operation of the law of Natural Selection, the more efficient social type, in which this end is being achieved, will gradually become ascendant, and in the end tend to eliminate all others. The whole process of our social evolution must, in short, become in time weighted in every detail by the interests of this larger future.

As, therefore, in that vst epoch of social development in which social efficiency was synonymous with military efficiency, the characteristic and ruling principle of the epoch was seen to be the supremacy of the causes which contributed to social efficiency by subordinating the individual simply to the existing social organisation; so now in the second epoch the distinctive ruling principle may be stated with equal clearness. It may be put into brief terms as follows :—

In the second epoch of the evolution of human society we begin to be concerned with the rise to ascendency of the ruling causes, which contribute to a higher type of soctal efficiency by subordinating soctety ttself with all its interests in the present to wts own future.