Principles of western civilisation

xs THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT 385

of Natural Selection they have become the exponents of the principle through which the main stream of the evolutionary process has come down through

Western history, and through which it descends

towards the future —then a sense of community different in kind, and also in intensity to any that has ever existed before, must come to express itself through the process which these peoples are carrying forward in the world. The development towards economic enfranchisement which Schmoller Saw pursuing its course subconsciously in history will, as it were, have attained to consciousness ; and with an immeasurably higher meaning and sterner sanction behind it than that of any of the tribal or local egoisms hitherto expressing themselves under the ideals of nationality.

On the horizon of modern thought we are, in short, in sight of the fact that in the progress of the world the days of “nationalities” in the old sense are numbered. The evolutionary process in Western history is slowly but surely converging towards a stage at which the struggle will be between a few great systems of social order, of which the political and economic structure will be, in the last resort, the outward expression of different interpretations of fundamental ethical conceptions. And the determining cause, in respect of which Natural Selection will eventually discriminate in the rivalry between them, must inevitably be the degree of efficiency with which they have embodied in the world-process that principle towards the expression of which the whole evolutionary drama moves—the subordination of the present to the future.

2X

ae