Principles of western civilisation

472 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP,

ciples governing the epoch of development on which we have entered ; and to see that the benefits accruing from the era of competition through which we have lived shall be retained and increased for society by compelling the new social order to make its way simply on its merits in free and fair rivalry with those activities of private effort which it is destined to supersede.

The enfranchisement of the future in a development in which the race is passing slowly under the control of the principles governing a process infinite in the future is a principle before which all others must eventually go down in the process of human progress. It is the principle with which the potentiality of our civilisation has been associated from the beginning. It is the characteristic principle with which the advance of the peoples destined to maintain a leading place in that civilisation must continue to be identified. No human foresight could, even at a period recent in history, have predicted, without insight into such a cause, the world-embracing future to which, irrespective of race, position, population, wealth, or natural resources, the action of this principle was about to raise in a comparatively brief period of time the small group of English-speaking peoples, otherwise so insignificant a component in our Western civilisation. So now all attempts to judge the future by any precedents drawn from the past, or by any comparisons whatever with standards which the world has known before, are entirely vain and meaningless. In the ancient civilisations the universal empire toward which the world had moved throughout unknown periods in the past had