Principles of western civilisation

348 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

civilisation, is that which we have in view in the rise of the system of Party Government, the immediate development of which in public life in England was coincident with the close of the era described in the last chapter. If the mind is carried back over the recent political history of the English-speaking world, it may be noticed that in almost every quarter it presents the same feature. Side by side with the increasing assertion of the right of every community, from the hamlet to a continent, to manage its own local affairs, there has been developed that phenomenon in public affairs now known as the system of government by party. No system of government has been more sweepingly condemned outside the countries where it exists. In it there survives, as indeed there still survives in most of the institutions of the present day, many of the evils of the era of evolution out of which the world is moving. No system of government is from time to time more scathingly criticised even in England and America. Nevertheless, no system has ever been invented which has given such efficient results as a cause of progress. Throughout the public affairs of the whole of the English-speaking peoples at the present day it is the life-principle of all effective criticism ; the most potent fact behind every condition of good government. For 150 years it has been the soul of that orderly unceasing stress of competing principles, from out of which the rapid but unhasting political progress of the English-speaking world has proceeded. Whatever its faults, it is the first large outward result in the political life of our civilisation of the ascendency of the principle which emerged out of