Principles of western civilisation

460 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

even such conditions of freedom in the modern sense as prevail amongst peoples who have not accepted this principle are scarcely more than its indirect effect, ultimately maintained in the world only by the example and overwhelming prestige of the results proceeding from it amongst the peoples who evolved it.

Now, if we apply this principle to the conditions in which we see the conception of Jazssez-fatre competition being confronted with that body of thought which is rapidly passing to the challenge of the ascendency of the present in the economic process throughout the world, there emerges into sight a clear and striking conclusion. The principle of dazssez-faive competition, as we have just seen it, under all its phases, reaching its last expression in the world-process, cannot by any pretence be said to represent that condition of the social process with which the efficiency of the future is identifiedthat condition in which all natural powers are to be enfranchised in the world in a regulated process of fair, open, and free rivalry. It represents, as we have seen, in the last analysis, nothing more than the survival into the economic process of the ascendency of the forces expressing themselves through the present and tending under all conditions towards absolutism in some form; the principle, that is to say, of that past order of the world’s development which it is the destiny of our civilisation to supersede.

There is, therefore, in the economic process also but one condition in which the present can ultimately pass under the control of the future. All the political developments which have taken place are but steps leading up to the establishment of that condition.