Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 465

up the group of peoples from the Atlantic to the Pacific into a conscious organic unity, which has enabled that unity to absorb, with a rapidity and completeness of which only the highest organic type could be capable, the millions that surrounded them and that have been poured upon them. It is the cause which has made the United States the largest free-trading area in the world; and which in this, and a multitude of other respects, constitutes the ultimate fact behind those conditions of intensity, and that outlook on the world which is so significant for the future of this section of the English-speaking peoples. Similarly in England at the present day, the observer can have gone little beneath the surface-meaning of current events, who does not realise in the same cause one of the profoundest nascent forces in existing politics. It is the cause behind that instinct which already associates with the collective life of that loosely federated commonwealth of peoples, incorrectly known as the British empire, a sense of responsibility, a meaning and a destiny in the future—in upholding throughout the world the conditions of development, and the standards of life won with such effort in our civilisation—the significance of which entirely transcends the content of the utilitarian Liberalism which prevailed in England in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. And in the English-speaking world asa whole it is already a cause from which proceeds an impetus of which no mind has as yet either measured the reach or foreseen the destiny. It is an impetus, moreover, which, proceeding from a cause that has no relation either to the conditions

or aims of current politics, but which, going deeper 2H