Principles of western civilisation
360 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.
in the world, simply as one so inherently absurd as to be beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion.
When we look back over the history of the process in which the conception has risen into ascendency in politics, it presents many remarkable features. It is this conception of equal political weight in the State which, we may perceive, has broken down the social and political barriers erected against the people by the power-holding classes in the past. It is this conception which, in bringing the people into the social conflict on terms of equality, has produced the environment in which the causes already discussed have been able to achieve in the existing world the remarkable results described. It is this conception which has been the direct political cause tending to the intensity of modern conditions. It is this conception which is producing those vast changes in the distribution of wealth to which current economic science is adjusting its theories. And, last of all, it is this conception which constitutes the cause, upon the continued ascendency of which in politics, every existing political reformer, including the Marxian Socialist, is counting for the realisation of that larger social and economic transformation which is perceived to lie in the future.
If it be asked to what reason we must attribute -the ascendency in Western history of this conception, entirely new and altogether exceptional in the world,—a conception which the almost universal opinion of the world down to the recent past would have regarded as absurd, and yet a conception, to all appearance, fundamentally related to the central meaning of that phase of the evolutionary process
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