Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN IWWORLD-CONFLICT 345

world pass under the direct influence of their laws and institutions. So now it is to none of these material or mechanical causes alone that we must look for the true reason of the exceptional expansion of the United States. It is upon the causes that have produced the extraordinary intensity of the economic conditions obtaining amongst the people of the United States that the attention of the observer of insight will be concentrated from the beginning. Itis the intensity of these conditions that exercises so marked an influence on the entire lifehabits of the people, that is producing a continually increasing effect upon the industrial development of our civilisation, and that must in time profoundly influence the tendencies of progress throughout the whole world. Without this cause even the great natural resources of the United States would not have counted. For without it the economic process in the United States would have taken at least a century longer to have reached its present advanced stage of development. It is the immeasurably deeper intensity of the economic and industrial conflict prevailing over the widest area of freedom hitherto cleared in the world which, more than any other cause, and more than all other causes together, has equipped the people of the United States with the irresistible potency they are about to exercise in the world in the economic era upon which we are entering.

Confining our attention, therefore, for the time being to the English-speaking section of the advanced peoples ;—how, it may be asked, have these peoples come to receive the equipment which has at the present day reached its most developed