Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 425

social phenomenon peculiar to our time, namely, the accumulation by a comparatively small number of persons under these conditions of fortunes of colossal magnitude. No conditions which prevailed under the most rigorous absolutisms of the ancient world allowed of such results. The inherent and elemental barbarism of conditions—even when due allowance is made for services rendered to society in the first stages in the organisation of industryunder which a private citizen is able to accumulate out of what must ultimately be the “enforced disadvantage” of the community, a fortune tending to equal in capital amount the annual revenue of Great Britain or the United States begins to deeply impress the general imagination.

Even where the individual, as is often, and even generally the case, rises at last in the disposal of such a fortune above the level of the conditions which have produced it, the result is hardly less striking. The subconscious effort to reconcile the dualism between the standards of two entirely different epochs of the world’s evolution as represented in the modern economic process is plainly in evidence. As the knights and barons of the early feudal ages, when brought under the influence of Christianity, devoted the wealth which they had acquired under other standards to the founding of churches and the endowment of charities, so the possessors of the colossal fortunes acquired under the conditions of the phase of the competitive process in which we are living, tend in some measure to endeavour to restore them to the public by the founding of libraries, the endowment of universities, and the initiation of large works of public philanthropy.