Principles of western civilisation

370 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

already in thought and in politics—slowly breaking and dissolving all the closed imperiums in which the free play of human activities would otherwise tend to be restrained and imprisoned.

In a remarkable study published shortly before his death, Professor Henry Sidgwick, in examining the relationship between political economy and ethics,! succeeded in bringing clearly before the general mind the lines along which this principle is destined to operate in producing the economic transformation which is slowly succeeding the revolution already accomplished in politics, and the effect of which must be everywhere to deepen the intensity of modern conditions.

Now the main stream of tendency in economics which is producing the gradual intensification of modern conditions may be presented in general terms as involving the same ideal as in an earlier stage in politics. As in politics the movement has been towards equal political rights ; so in economics it is now a movement towards equality of economic opportunity. In the modern world it has already become, says Professor Sidgwick, ‘an ethical postulate that the distribution of wealth in a well-ordered State should aim at realising political justice.” Yet in the era of unorganised and unrestricted competition which has succeeded the prevalence in the world of the Jatssez-faive conceptions with which the standards of the Manchester school of free exchange became associated, what we see is, Says Professor Sidgwick in effect, that society is struggling with the fact that the so called free exchange of the

1 « Political Economy and Ethics,” Dict. of Polstical Economy, vol. iii. 2 [bid.

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