Principles of western civilisation

344 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

system of order which it is destined to produce, there can be no doubt.

When the observer stands at the present time in the midst of the industrial life of the eastern and middle states of America, it gradually dawns on his mind, if he has mastered the subject, that there is a fact in the equipment of the United States in the economic struggle upon which the world is entering, the overwhelming significance of which is hardly ever fully grasped by the European student. This is the degree of intensity at present reached in the economic process in that country. Never before in the world, and nowhere else in the world at the present time, has the economic process attained to the conditions that are here represented. The attention of the world is still fixed on a great number of other causes, to which it attributes the enormous industrial expansion of the United States which is in progress under its eyes. The history of the country, its geographical position, and the great natural resources and endowments of the land, are all pointed to in turn. There need be no disposition to underrate any of these advantages. But it will in all probability be distinguished in the future that it is to none of them that the expansion of the United States is in the first instance due.

In respect of no such material advantages, for instance, could it have been foretold, in the midst of the European development described in the last chapter, that the insignificant section of European peoples who spoke English were about in a brief period to become a fourth of the white population of the earth, and to see nearly half the