Principles of western civilisation

388 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP. X

world becoming inflexible and inexorable at the point at which its own principle of tolerance is threatened. It is the only ideal under which the lesser present can pass under the control of the greater future. It is the ideal which in its ultimate form must reach the limits of a Stateless competition of all the individuals of every land, in which the competitive potentiality of all natural powers shall be completely enfranchised. And it is advancing towards realisation in modern history, not through the powers of States or of Governments to enforce it ; but in virtue of the sterner fact that in the stress of Natural Selection every other system of social order must in the end go down before the strenuousness and efficiency of the life of the peoples who have won their way towards it.