Principles of western civilisation

g2 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

and machinery of the existing State. In it we see, as it were, the post-Reformation ideas of modern history allied with the conception of the omnipotent State which Henry IV. sought to realise in the Empire in medieval Europe. We have, therefore, that striking spectacle in modern politics, namely, the dominance in all schools of thought in the current life of Germany of the theory of the omnipotence of the State—with the resulting identification of the science of the political State with the science of society in process of evolution. In the result, it may be said of modern Germany, as a recent writer has correctly remarked, “that, notwithstanding their manifold divergencies, all the leading political parties are based on substantially the same idea of the omnipotence of the State. Here the Conservative _ and the Social Democrat take the same ground, whatever may be their differences in regard to the ways of the manifestation of authority by the State and the regulations as to the distribution of property.” * When the mind is carried to the stand-point of the socialistic parties in Germany, who frankly adopt the theories of Marx, and who, therefore, openly accept the materialistic interpretation of history, we see how the earlier theories of Bentham and the Mills in England have been carried at last to their full logical application. For here the ascendency of the present, and, therefore, of the economic factor, is no longer simply an implied principle in the historical process. It has become now the avowed end to which every tendency of current social progress is necessarily made subservient. In this respect the two phases of modern thought represented by Marx, on

1 «* Bismarck,” by William Clarke, Contemporary Review, No. 397-