Principles of western civilisation

372 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

nomic process as it has already carried us in the other developments that have taken place in Western history will be apparent on reflection. It is the influence of the same sense of responsibility projected outside the State that we have still in sight ; a principle which, acting through the consciousness of society, is, in economics, just as in thought, in knowledge, and in politics, gradually interposing between the present and the future a principle which operates towards preventing the natural despotisms of the time from exercising their inherent tendency to close in upon us in the present. In the result we have, therefore, the gradually increasing tendency towards the interference of society with the principles regulating the affairs of modern industry. Beginning with the relations of capital to labour, it has resulted in the tendency of society to enable the worker—although as yet in conditions in which the principles of a past era of development still survive in great strength on both sides of the struggle—to reach under the law a position in which he is ina condition to take part on more equal terms in the conflict of forces going on around him.’ It is resulting in the tendency of society to equip the worker in the competition of life more and more efficiently at the general expense. But, over and above everything else, we may perceive that this conception, as all the circumstances of the modern world-struggle are becoming deeply influenced by the emotion of social justice, is slowly developing, and is bound to continue to develop, in the State itself an entirely new attitude of collective responsibility towards all the principles regulating 1 Cf History of Trade Unionism, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.