Principles of western civilisation

464 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

development of our civilisation, must eventually come into operation. In other words :—

Lt ts only within the great spaces cleared in the worldprocess round rdeals which are in the last resort the expression of the ethical principle here enunciated, and which are held open and free in the present by an erresistible will operating in obedience to a sense of responsibility to a principle of tolerance transcending the claims of all existing interests, that the controlling meaning of the economic process can ever be permanently projected out of the present on the world-stage.

This is the meaning which the peoples that represent certain organised phases of the advancing life of our civilisation are now struggling to express, in the consciousness of a collective life in those great ethical ideals. which are tending amongst these peoples to take the place of those represented in the past under the concepts of nationality. It is undoubtedly amongst the peoples who have already carried farthest the characteristic principles of the development we have followed through Western history since the beginning of our era, that the cause here described is destined in the near future to play the greatest part in the world-process. The observer can have little insight into the tendencies of current events who does not perceive that amongst the advanced peoples at the present day this movement of the developmental principles of our civilisation towards consciousness, is already a fact in Western history, the significance of which overshadows that of any other tendency of the time. In the existing territory of United States it is, as was indicated in the previous chapter, the real cause beneath the surface which has built