Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 449

and admitted to intermarriage with the white races. The time was not improbably close at hand, Mr. Pearson assumed, when, in consequence, we should, by force of circumstances, have to realise that the idea that the future of the world belonged to the Aryan peoples, to the Christian faith, and to our Western civilisation, had been little more than a passing delusion.’

Despite the profound materialism of such a prediction ; despite the surroundings of moral and intellectual squalor toward which it contemplated the world as moving; despite even the inherent absurdity which, in the face of the obvious meaning of the social evolutionary process in the past, actually saw the lower forms of human society extinguishing the higher, by reason of their capacity to wage an economic struggle on more purely animal conditions, the deep and lasting impression which the prediction produced on a large circle of well-informed minds, particularly in England, went to show how accurately it was recognised as being, in reality, no more than the legitimate application of those theories of the Manchester school which had been in the ascendant in Great Britain for the greater part of the nineteenth century.

From time to time, particularly as we approach the period in which we are living, deep, volcanic impulses of human nature have disturbed the complacent theories of non-responsibility that have made a prediction of this nature possible. The refusal of labour in the United States and Australia to admit the Chinese as citizens, who would by their competition reduce the standards of wages

1 bid. c. i. 2G