Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 463

destiny of our civilisation to carry the world, be realised. In no other conditions can the controlling meaning of the economic process in relation to the problems of modern industry ever be projected beyond the content of a struggle, bounded always by the horizon of existing interests ; wherein we now see the strongest competitors, simply in virtue of the qualities contributing to survival in a free fight in the present, tending to become absolute in conditions of power as irresponsible and of monopoly as colossal as any which characterised the civilisations of the ancient world.

As in the light of the same principle the mind continues to look along the horizon where the present merges into the future, we catch sight of the meaning of that still deeper instinct with which it may be distinguished that all the peoples representing the advancing life of our civilisation are struggling at the present time—that instinct, that is to say, which Schmoller and the historical school in economics imperfectly endeavoured to express under the conception of nationality. The mistaken conception of the Manchester school, that the progress won for the race could be maintained, and that the ideal of an open, fair, and free rivalry under which all human capacities should have the right of universal opportunity could ever be realised in the conditions of a process of competitive trade, regulated, of necessity, at the level of the qualities governing an international scramble for private gain, already belongs to the immature imaginings of a period beyond which the world has moved. What we see is that in this case also the principle we have traced throughout, as represented in the