Principles of western civilisation

382 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

impresses the evolutionist, when he perceives its relation to the future, is the degree of intensity tending to be reached in the economic process in that country. As the observer moves from the Eastern and Middle to the Western States, a conviction of the enormous potentiality in the future, if the development of the United States continues to be along healthy lines, of the conditions making towards the free conflict of economic forces which he sees extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, grows upon the mind. He has before him what he realises to be, beyond doubt, immeasurably the most important area hitherto cleared in the world within which the conditions of such freedom are tending to prevail. Even as regards the conditions of free exchange, it is within this area that there has already been reached the largest practical application in the world of the principle of Free Trade.

What has been the vast cause that, so far, must have overruled the multitude of local, of present, and of particular interests which here—and to a far greater degree than at the stage Schmoller described—must have found their own natural aims ranged in inevitable opposition to the operation of that larger cause subordinating the particular to the universal which, in producing the prevailing intensity of conditions, is about to win for the United States in general such a commanding place in the future?

The answer to this question appears simple and obvious. And yet, as soon as we see its ultimate application, we have extended our view indefinitely beyond the horizon of all theories of the State and of nationality. The cause is, we see, simply the