Principles of western civilisation

416 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Western history, it soon becomes apparent that all the phenomena of the economic process are closely related to a single governing principle, and that in the affairs of industry, as in the relations of capital to labour, it is only the confusion and incompleteness of the first stages of the competitive era which intervene to prevent the mind, for a time, from realising that the characteristic and essential condition of free competition which it has become the significant destiny of our civilisation to import into the evolutionary process is, in reality, not present at all.

As the economic process has continued to develop in recent times the tendencies inherent in it have become gradually visible. In the first place, it has become obvious that through an immense range of activities in modern industry and commerce, the effectiveness of the competitors has on the whole tended to rapidly increase with the size and centralisation of the concerns engaged. This is a result due to two causes which it is of importance to keep quite distinct in the mind. It is undoubtedly true that, in economy of working and in the increased efficiency of centralised management, large organisations under modern conditions tend as a matter of course to become up to a definite point the natural superiors of their smaller competitors. But beyond this there is a further cause which, although it remains in the background at first, becomes visible at a subsequent stage as a ruling factor of the competitive process. In the modern conditions of unregulated conflict it has become obvious that the larger organisations also secure, in respect of their size and resources, and altogether apart from their efficiency, an immense advantage over the

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