Principles of western civilisation

368 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

for the intensity of the process of progress amongst the advanced peoples, and the scrutiny be carried now into the midst of the conditions in which we see Western development moving slowly towards the challenge of the ascendency of the present in the economic process in all its phases throughout the world, the interest of the spectacle continues to increase. If we may anticipate for a moment the discussion of a feature to be fully dealt with in the next chapter, it may be briefly said that the movement in which the Manchester school of economics in England endeavoured to produce the conditions of free competition in the world was from the beginning involved in a closed circle. It represented little more than the struggle of existing economic interests to free themselves from the incumbrances which the feudal rule of the past had hitherto imposed on society. The larger meaning of the vast struggle between the future and the present in the economic process had as yet scarcely any place or meaning in it. It is not, we may perceive, upon free competition itself, but rather upon the first crude attempts to apply it to human affairs, that the mind of the world has hitherto been concentrated in its preoccupation with the economic situation as it has been presented in the theories of the Manchester school in England.

What we are coming to see, therefore, is that by the policy of /atssez-faire, or leaving things alone, with which the Manchester school of economics first associated the conception of free exchange in England, it has been absolutely impossible to get such a thing in the modern world as free play of the competitive forces. The present is still every-