Principles of western civilisation

362 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

When, in the light of this circumstance, we look more closely at the political development proceeding in the State, we may perceive the larger meaning that certain features of it begin now to assume before the mind. We may even go so far as to compress into a formula the clue to the political process in modern society. What we see is that it is along the line where the ethical phenomena, proceeding from the existence in men’s minds of this sense of responsibility to principles transcending their conception of the State, have come into conflict with occupying interests, sheltering themselves behind the State, that the stress of the forward movement is developing itself in modern politics.

Still confining observation to the history of the English-speaking peoples, it may accordingly be distinguished how, from the conclusion of the conflict described in the last chapter down to the present day, it is this principle operating in men’s minds which has set them to struggle in grim and devoted strife against that almost equally determined resistance which every occupying interest in the State has offered to the modern spirit. It is sometimes taken for granted that the conditions of modern progress are but the expression of tendencies that have always existed in the world. But, as Maine insists, “it is indisputable that much the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by their embodiment in some permanent record.”' It has only been, in short, a cause more elemental than itself that has overcome that unrelent-

1 Ancient Law, c. 1.