Principles of western civilisation

350 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of which has come to permeate the entire atmosphere of the intellectual and ethical life of the English-speaking world, as the result of the ascendency therein of the principle which emerged into view in the development described in the last chapter. It is a condition which may be perceived to represent, in the last resort, the tacit assumption, even when the individual may appear to repudiate it, that the claim of right upon those who profess to be its adherents goes deeper than the claim of loyalty to any system of government, or of party, or of authority, representing itself for the time being as its expression. It is, in short, the subconscious admission of the fact that, however intense our convictions, we are not the ultimate repositories of truth, and that, therefore, our opponents may after all be right.’ This is why the peoples who have not been beaten out in history beneath the tremendous blows of the developmental process described in the last chapter, and whose habit of mind it is, consequently, to see right or truth absolute in a principle or institution, have on the whole failed to successfully develop the system of Party in government, or even to grasp its essential meaning. The vast assumption which underlies it involves, it may be perceived, a conception of the nature of ultimate principles which they have never accepted. The fact that parties or their leaders should be at once uncompromisingly hostile and yet be mutually tolerant ; that they should enforce their principles on the whole 1 The fundamental difference in this respect which separates even the abstract idea of the State in Latin countries on the continent of Europe from the idea of the State in England, where the limitation of all powers and rights

is deeply rooted in the subconsciousness of the community, will be often obvious in current affairs at the present day to the deeper student of politics.

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