Principles of western civilisation

458 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

effect, the ascendency of the present in the evolutionary process. Our civilisation represents that type of social order in which, if existing indications are not entirely misleading, the military order of society is actually destined to come to an end. And yet, as we have seen, the advanced peoples who comprise it themselves represent, not by accident, but as a first principle of the development which is taking place, that stock of the human family amongst whom the military process has culminated in the race. We are par excellence the military peoples, not only of the entire world, but of the evolutionary process itself in human history in the past.

The dominating significance of this fact in the evolution of society has been throughout insisted on. Under no other conceivable conditions could the principle which our civilisation represents be successfully born into the world. It was only by the conversion to a sense of responsibility transcending all interests in the present of the peoples representing the highest possibilities of militarism in the world,—the peoples, that is to say, able to hold the present for the future against all comers,that the permanent conditions could ever arise in which the controlling centre of the evolutionary process could begin to be projected out of the present.

But it is, it may be perceived, exactly the same principle which has been behind the whole process of development in our civilisation as described in the preceding chapters. It was only by the conversion to the new order of ideas, in the upheaval which closed the Middle Ages, of an element of force in