Principles of western civilisation

376 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Now as the principles of the modern more empirical school of political economy developed in England have come to be illuminated by the results obtained by the historical methods of German workers like Roscher, List, Hildebrand, Knies, and Schmoller, the economic life of our civilisation has begun to present to view the outlines of a large organic process slowly unfolding itself in Western history along certain clearly-defined lines of development. The leading principle of this process is very striking; and yet it is in a large way so simple that it may readily be grasped by the general mind when it is once pointed out. Put into a few words, it is, that our economic progress represents the steps in a slowly ascending development in which the winning systems are those within which the economic process is tending to reach the highest intensity as the result of the gradual subordination of the particular to the universal. No modern worker has done more to bring into view the steps in the process by which this result is being accomplished than Schmoller; and although the economic process in Germany, in the conditions under which he discusses it, is still some stages behind the phase it has already reached in England and the United States, the importance of his work, in enabling us the more thoroughly to grasp the full significance of the antinomy we have been endeavouring to describe, is scarcely lessened on that account.

When Schmoller takes up the economic process in Europe at the period of the break-up of feudalism, the conditions that present themselves, as

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