Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 455

distinguished by any observer of close insight. It consists essentially in the clear recognition that the principle underlying all the forms of laissezfaire competition is, in the last resort, nothing more or less than what we have here found it to be; namely, a surviving principle of barbarism, necessarily tending, under all its phases, towards the conditions of absolutism. In the last analysis it does not represent, and it can never represent, the characteristic social principle with which the meaning of our civilisation has been from the beginning identified in the evolutionary process. Here, however, it may be observed, a curious result has followed. The main body of thought which socialism has hitherto produced has been principally the product of the earlier stage of the struggle between capital and labour in those conditions of aissez-faire competition that have been already described. It has, therefore, happened that in the socialistic conception of society which has so far obtained most adherents, namely, that which is associated with the name of Marx, the whole social process has tended to be presented as if it constituted merely the phenomena of a gigantic class war between labour and capital. A characteristic feature, therefore, of Marxian socialism, as has been insisted throughout these pages, is that it tends to interpret all the principles of social development merely in terms of an economic struggle, that is to say, in terms of a war of interests between the existing members of society. Of that altogether deeper meaning of the evolutionary process in Western history; namely, that the characteristic struggle around which the whole process of develop-