Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA IL

pletely emancipated from the past in conditions in which the gratification of the desires, and the furtherance of the interests, of the component individuals shall have been made as complete as possible. There has been no system of ideas that has ever held the mind of the world from which the intellectual basis has been so completely struck away. That theory of human religions which so many minds have followed and surpassed Mr. Spencer in developing merely as a theory of survivals in the present ; that theory of psychology, developed from Hume to Huxley, in which the content of the human mind is viewed simply as a condition in which the present is related to past experience either in the individual or in the race; that widely prevalent conception of social progress developed from Voltaire to Marx as a movement towards a state in which the self-conscious present is to be finally organised towards the complete expression

+ Compare the chapter ‘‘ Of the Stationary State,” J. S. Mill’s Polétécal Lconomy, book iv., with Marx’s Cagital, ch. i. s. 4, and cxxxii. ; also with Spencer's Principles of Ethics, §§ 48, 49. Mr. James Bonar thus describes the causes which tended to impress the German socialists with the idea that all social progress is nothing more than economic progress. ‘* What impressed the German socialists— Marx, Lassalle, Engels, Kautsky—was the demonstrably economic character of many political changes of the last 300 years. In the course of industrial changes the medieval landowners gave up their power to the capitalists, and the capitalists to the employers of labour. Therefore, said the German socialists, all is due to a change in the prevailing form of production. Where agriculture prevails we have a territorial aristocracy, a certain political system, and certain social institutions and laws; where commerce prevails we have another system; where manufacture, a third. This explains the rise of the middle classes into political power, but also the advance of the working classes as a power that will displace them and be (as we are told it ought to be) all in all. As in the economic theory of Marx and Engels all value is from labour, so on the great scale of politics ail power is to be with the labouring class. Economic progress is thus the only real progress ; the essence of all history is economics ;

the essence of all economics is labour” (Zhe Economic Journal, vol. viii. No. 32).