Principles of western civilisation

408 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

circumstances of free competition. It can be only a matter of time, as the process gradually develops itself, and as it eliminates from the struggle all elements but those contributing to success therein, for the world to see that the distinctive principle for which our civilisation stands—that principle the characteristic effect of which is to secure the conditions of really free competition by emancipating the evolutionary process from the tyrannies through which the present tends to strangle the future—is as yet entirely unrepresented and unexpressed in this first conception of the principles of free competition.

If we look, accordingly, at the history of the movement proceeding from the Manchester school of thought in England—that movement with which the first intoxication of the perception of the importance of the principle of free competition in our civilisation must always remain identified—the fate which we see to be overtaking it in our time is presented in an aspect so striking, that the interest of the situation falls little short of the dramatic.

A quarter of a century after Adam Smith had published the Wealth of Nations in England, we see Ricardo already beginning to assume the absolute potency of the uncontrolled competitive forces to regulate the entire social process. This was the time when, under the conditions of uncontrolled competition, women and young children were being employed for twelve and fifteen hours a day in the factories of Great Britain in circumstances so terrible, and with results so appalling, that the memory of them still haunts like a nightmare the literature of the modern industrial revolution in England. It was the time when it was said that