Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 5

bodily within this narrow foreground. Through all the literature which has come down to us from the Revolution in France, through nearly all the present literature of the social revolt in Germany, through all the theories of that school of social philosophy long dominant in England, developed by Bentham, Austin, James Mill, Stewart, Malthus, Grote, Ricardo, and J. S. Mill, there runs one fundamental conception into which all others are ultimately fitted; namely, that the science of society is the science of the interests of those capable at any particular moment of exercising the rights of universal suffrage, and that the interest of society is always the same thing as the interest of the individuals comprised within the limits of its political consciousness.

Yet what we see now is that the theory of society as a whole has been lifted to an entirely different plane. For if there is one principle more than another which the evolutionary hypothesis tends to set forth in a clear light it is that the forces which are shaping the development of progressive peoples are not primarily concerned with these interests at all. The winning peoples who now inherit the world are they whose history in the past has been the theatre of the operation of principles the meaning of which must have at every point transcended the meaning of the interests of those who at any time comprised the existing members of society. Nay, more, the people in the present who are already destined to inherit the future are not they whose institutions revolve round any ideal schemes of the interests of existing members of society. They are simply the peoples who