Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 361

in the midst of which we are living,—there can be no doubt as to what the answer must be. The cause which has led to the ascendency among the advanced peoples of the conception of the right of every man to equal voting power, irrespective of birth, of creed, of intelligence, of capacity, or even of the nature or amount of his interest in the State, has beyond doubt no relation to any theory of the State bounded by the limits of political consciousness. It simply cannot be fitted into any theory of society based on the relation to each other of existing interests in the State. Im the end it overleaps all such considerations. In the last analysis we perceive that it undoubtedly results from the existence in men’s minds of a sense of responsibility to each other which is projected beyond all the objects for which the political State is conceived as existing. When, in short, we reach the cause which has given men political equality irrespective of all conditions and qualifications, we stand once more in the presence of the principle we have been discussing throughout. In other words, strange though it may appear, the fundamental principle of political tolerance, which is implied in this theory of equality, can, like the fundamental principle of intellectual tolerance—whether the individual be conscious of it or not—only be held by the world as an ultimate conviction of the religious consciousness. It is, that is to say, the principle through which the evolutionary process is accomplishing the subordination of the present to a future transcending the content of political consciousness, which constitutes the controlling cause behind all the outward phenomena of political equality in the modern world.