Principles of western civilisation

450 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

and of living far below those to which they have been raised with such effort in our civilisation, has been an incident in which determined expression has been found for a far-reaching instinct, with which governments, otherwise under the influence of the ascendant conceptions of /azssez-faive competition, have had to count. It has been a fact, which, though for the moment producing little outward effect on prevailing theories, has operated powerfully, as other features of the underlying situation have continued to define themselves, to bring home to more thoughtful minds how far indeed, here as everywhere else, the problems with which J/azssez-faire competition now tends to confront us throughout the world have outgrown in character the earlier conceptions of the competitive era in England.

In China, the twentieth century opened upon a spectacle in which we see the principle here described carried, as it were, to its last expression in the world-process. Under the inspiration of the old policy of non- responsibility, practically two ideals were presented to the English - speaking world, as the capitalistic exploitation of the Chinese peoples began to make progress in our time. The first was that which we saw in the ascendant in the minds of the English people during the greater part of the nineteenth century. It was that under which, all responsibility for results in China being repudiated, it was maintained that the trader or capitalist should be allowed to follow his purposes in the competitive process of trade under the ruling principle of non-interference. As, however, all Western civilisation had gradually become enveloped