Principles of western civilisation

EX THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 373

and controlling that play of forces of which modern business and industry have become the theatre.

The enormous potentiality of the antithesis thus being developed in current economic history, and thus presenting, as we may perceive, but the latest phase of the antinomy of which we have traced the development through Western history, is calculated when it is clearly perceived to deeply impress the scientific imagination. To appreciate the full significance of the evolutionary principle which is at work among the advanced peoples, it is necessary to look as yet rather beyond the horizon of accepted results, and into the stress of those conditions of the street and the market-place, in which the new forces that are striving to assert themselves already impinge on the consciousness of the individual. The problem which Professor Sidgwick has defined presents practically the same features in England and the United States. But in many of its phases it has already reached a more advanced development in the latter country. We may already perceive, for instance, how profoundly and inherently antagonistic, in the long-run, must be the significance of the acceptance of the ethical postulate “ that the distribution of wealth in a well-ordered State should aim at realising political justice,” to the spirit of the conditions which, under the name of free competition, allows a private citizen to amass a fortune, equal in capital amount to the annual revenue of a first-class State, out of his competitors or customers. The conditions themselves obviously represent the ascendency in the economic process of the ruling principle of the era of evolution out of which we have moved. They have about them an inherent aspect of