Principles of western civilisation

146 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

which is here presented, its features begin to grow upon the mind. Slowly we distinguish that we have before us conditions leading up to a supreme crisis from which there must proceed some of the most remarkable phenomena that the evolution of society is destined to present. From far back beyond the earliest mists of human history we see the workings of that stage of social development in which the subordination of the individual to organised society is being effected — involved in the tendencies of a vast military process which must culminate in a type of social organisation of which the very life-principle must be that of vigorous, conscious self-assertion; and in which every institution must bear upon it, in the last resort, the mark of its relationship to the condition of military ascendency. And yet it is from this type of society that the new social order must arise. It is from the peoples who stand forth in the evolutionary process as the supreme survivors of these untold ages of military selection, and from these alone, that there must now be developed that higher type of social efficiency of which the essential life-principle is that every interest of the existing social order must be subordinated to interests which are not only not included within the present time, or within the existing social organisation, but which must remain projected beyond the content of even political consciousness.

We have evidently here the outlines of a cardinal position in the development of human society, a situation in which the master-principles that are shaping the course of human evolution must meet and come into conflict. As the mind is carried back to the first