Principles of western civilisation

XE THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 383

same deep-lying organic cause which has made the population of the United States a single people; which decided at the beginning that the original States should not set up barriers against each other which later, and at a supreme crisis of their existence, prevented them from breaking up into two separate nationalities. It is the cause which has driven the same people to absorb into this unity, and to digest with a rapidity and completeness elsewhere unknown, the various fragments of the Latin civilisations with which they were originally surrounded. It is the cause which has driven them to absorb with equal rapidity, and to build up into a new social order, the millions which Europe has continued to pour upon them. But in all this we must realise that it is no mere expansion of a race or of a nationality we are watching here. It is the conquering march of principles becoming conscious—the principles born into the world through the long stress of the process we have been describing throughout. The cause at work is similar in all respects to that which, moving in the minds of another branch of the peoples representing the same principles, has recently resulted in the federation of the Australian continent—or which, acting on others, leads them to dream of still wider ideals of unity among English-speaking peoples. But it is a cause which has no direct relation to the conscious machinery of governments, of politics, or of States. It represents rather the slow convergence towards each other in a majestic process of natural development of the forces and factors with which the ultimate meaning of our civilisation is identified, and under the control of

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