Principles of western civilisation

x TOWARDS THE FUTURE 459

our civilisation strong enough to hold for the future the stage of the world on which these ideas were to develop, that it became possible for the modern epoch to be born in our civilisation. It was only by the later conversion, amongst the advanced peoples, of the State itself—with the machinery of its irresistible power in the background—to a principle of tolerance resting ultimately on a sense of responsibility to principles projected beyond the content of all interests within the bounds of political consciousness, that it became possible for the present to be held for the future in modern political development. It has been the principle of tolerance so held that has made possible the phenomenon of party government among the English-speaking peoples ; that has constituted the ultimate fact behind that conception of political equality from which the forward movement in the modern State has proceeded ; nay, which has made possible the very condition of free thought itself by preventing the absolutism naturally inherent in every theory of interests bounded by the limits of political consciousness from again closing down upon usin the present. The principle identified at every point with the development of the winning peoples in our civilisation has been the same as that which made it possible to develop our civilisation itself only from the leading military stock of the world. It has been the fact of the all-powerful State converted to a principle of tolerance projected beyond the limits of its own political consciousness, and, therefore, becoming rigid, irresistible, and inexorable when this principle of tolerance is threatened, which has given us the modern world and all the conditions of modern progress. And