Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 451

in the influences and methods of the commercial process as it had spread outwards from England and the United States, and as the traders and capitalists of other nations had now become equally keen in the competitive struggle for private gain, this idea, in China as elsewhere, became in a few decades impossible of realisation. The process, therefore, under our eyes passed rapidly to its next stage, in which all efforts became concentrated on the second objective of the school of /azssez-fatre competition, namely, that of keeping the door of trade equally open to comers of all nationalities, while still repudiating all responsibility for the tendencies and results of the competitive process. In the result we see that process once more continuing to fall inevitably, and now with extreme rapidity, to the level of its ruling factor. With the instinctive, and at times explosive resistance of the Chinese to all that the conditions must imply, there has tended of necessity to be produced a kind of international control by all the Powers concerned, including Japan. In this ring of control we have represented the standards of human society in almost every stage of development, from those of Japan to those of England and the United States. In such conditions the principles we have seen born into the world as the result of the long development described in the preceding chapters—the principles of which the Englishspeaking peoples have in other circumstances considered themselves the most advanced representatives—tend to be reduced to a common denominator with those of powers and peoples, separated from them by entire epochs of the. world’s development.