Principles of western civilisation

x THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 363

ing resistance to change in the vested order of the world, which Maine correctly distinguished to be the universal characteristic of all human society down into the existing era of Western civilisation. This is why that, despite the transforming results accomplished by the modern spirit among the English-speaking peoples, it is, nevertheless, at the same time true, extraordinary as the statement may seem, that, to use the words of a recent English writer, “there is in the English character scarcely anything in sympathy with the spirit of modern Liberalism.”1 The native Teutonic habit of mind, underlying the English, American, and German character, represents, of necessity, certain qualities —tenacity of purpose, determination in the presence of opposition, love for action, and hunger for power, all tending to express themselves through the State —which were the necessary equipment of that military type which has won in the supreme stress of Natural Selection its right of place as the only type able to hold the stage of the world in the long epoch during which the present is destined to pass under the control of the future. But, for the same cause, it is simply a matter of course that there should be in such a type of character, of its own nature, “scarcely anything in sympathy with the spirit of modern Liberalism.”

The modern progressive movement in politics among the English-speaking peoples has, therefore, represented a dynamic force in history so immense that the ordinary mind has little or no conception of it. Nothing is more common in current economic studies, than to see the prolonged movement, which

* «The Future of Liberalism,” MJacmillan’s Magazine, vol. \xxii. 1895.