Principles of western civilisation

16 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

If, however, at the opening of the twentieth century, we look in England at the party which has behind it the tradition of such an imposing process of progress, the spectacle is one of peculiar interest, The great utilitarian movement of the nineteenth century has run its course, having brought under the domination of its principles almost all the leading tendencies of political and economic development in England and the United States. But the signs on all hands are apparent which mark how profoundly the dim prescience of the significance of the position which has been reached in Western thought has begun to affect the party which has thus so directly represented in the past the causes that are carrying the modern world forward.

To the more thinking mind the nature of the revolution which has been effected has already begun to be apparent. “The basis of the old radicalism has gone,” says one of the most radical of recent political writers in England.’ The one idea, it is pointed out, which had become common to all the groups of English, Continental, and American Radicals in the past, was the organisation, of society towards the gratification of the desires, and the furtherance of the interests, of the existing individuals in political societies. It was this conception that the old radicalism held always in the

this 500 millions would not have been more than about 170 millions. . . . The development was for the most part not uniform among the European populations. It was most marked in the Anglo-American section. The increase here was from a population of not more than about 20 millions, which was the population of the United States and the United Kingdom together a hundred years ago, to a population of not less than 130 millions at the present time. Russia and Germany also showed remarkable increases, but nothing like this (Address to the Manchester Statistical Society, October 1900). 1 William Clarke, Political Sctence Quarterly, vol. xiv.