Principles of western civilisation

14 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

expansion of England and the United States have rendered all recent political and economic science scarcely more than a study or a criticism of the principles under which that expansion has taken place—it is the ideas associated with the movement which the party of progress in England represents that have been in the ascendant in the process of political development throughout the world.

It is the conceptions of the included movement which are registered in the constitutional documents in which the people of the United States have expressed their political convictions. It is mainly the theories of society evolved in the still earlier phase of the struggle in England between the principle of authority and the popular will that were put into circulation in France by Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, D’Alembert, and which we follow towards our own time through the subsequent literature of the French Revolution.' It is the prestige of the theory of government as evolved in this movement, and principally among the English-speaking peoples, that has dominated the modern development towards democratic institutions throughout the world. All the principal landmarks in modern thought, from Hobbes

this occasion is remarkable not only for its constitutional soundness, but for the perspicuity with which it states the actual question in contest, stripped of all disguises and evasions. ‘To assert the inherent right of the Prince of Wales to assume the government is virtually to revive those exploded ideas of the divine and indefeasible authority of princes which have so justly sunk into contempt and almost oblivion. Kings and princes derive their power from the people ; and to the people alone, through the organ of their representatives, does it appertain to decide in cases for which the constitution has made no specific or positive provision’ ” (Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, vol. ii. p. 39). 1 Cf. Natural Rights, by David G. Ritchie, chap. i.