Principles of western civilisation

448 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

tending throughout the world to be forced to the level of its lowest and most animal conditions in human labour, simply in obedience to that law of universal equalisation of economic conditions by capital in the irresponsible scramble for private gain divorced from all sense of responsibility which the Manchester school consistently contemplated. It must not be supposed that this represents any extreme or forced view of a principle. It is a sober presentation of what has been already actually foreseen and contemplated. It may be recalled here that in the last decade of the nineteenth century a scientific forecast of the ultimate phase of the dazssezfaire competitive process in international trade throughout the world was attempted by the late Charles Pearson, in which the author, carrying the principles of the Manchester school to their last application, calmly contemplated as a probable fact of the near future a condition of civilisation in which, the tendency to equalisation in the international economic process having proceeded to its limits, that process wo/d continue to be permanently ruled throughout the world at the level of this lowest factor, namely, the prevailing standards of life of the less developed peoples, and particularly of the yellow races." We were, therefore, to awake to a day not far distant, Mr. Pearson predicted, when we should look round the globe and seé it girdled by a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression, but monopolising the trade of their own regions, circumscribing the industry of the European, taken up into the social relations of the Western peoples,

| National Life and Character, c. i.-iii.