Principles of western civilisation

346 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

phase in the intensity of the economic conditions prevailing in the United States? It is an equipment, the import of which has been, as yet, scarcely grasped by the modern mind. It is necessary to look beneath the surface of the political and economic life of the age, and to see how deeply during the past century the spirit, the example, and the methods of the system of social order which has grown up in the English-speaking world have already influenced the whole of Western civilisation, to realise for how much the principles that have produced it count in the world. The full significance of these principles can, indeed, be grasped only when their relationship is perceived to that ultimate fact of Western history we have been discussing throughout—namely, that all other systems of social order must in the end go down before those within which the future has been emancipated in the freest and most efficient conflict of forces in the present. When we regard the conditions in which the evolutionary process is slowly advancing towards the challenge of the ascendency of the present in the economic life of the modern world, we have in view a spectacle of the highest interest. To understand, however, the character of the forces involved it is desirable that the mind should, as far as possible, continue its advance from the position reached in the last chapter. Now, if we look beneath the surface of the life of the English-speaking world at the present day, it may readily be perceived, if the examination is carried far enough, how profoundly the entire character of the social process amongst the included peoples has been influenced, as the great antinomy of which the development