Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 343

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a struggle in which the ascendency of the present is destined to be broken in the economic process, in the conditions of such a free and efficient conflict of forces as has never prevailed in the world before. When the observer, at the present time, has advanced some distance towards the mastery of the principles underlying the economic development in progress in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic, it is impossible to avoid being struck with the significance of the process as a whole. In the section of that world represented in the United States, we have in view the economic process in conditions of undoubtedly the highest intensity and potentiality it has ever reached in the world. In the section of which England is the centre we catch sight, moreover, for the first time in history, of a conception round which a practical system of world-politics—in the face of difficulties, still from time to time pronounced by its critics to be insurmountable—is actually slowly beginning to centre; namely, the ideal of a stateless competition of all the individuals of every land, in which the competitive potentiality of all natural powers shall be at last completely enfranchised in the world. Despite the undoubted survival in great strength into this process, as it is now represented in both sections of the English-speaking world, of many conceptions and principles representing a past era of human evolution ; despite the vigorous expression therein of ideals which represent the ascendency of the present under some of the most colossal phases it has attained in history ;—of the tendency of the process as a whole, of the character of the forces behind it, and of the place in the world of the new