Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 27

therefore, in a competition for gain divorced from the sense of responsibility, we see the process here also falling to the level of its ruling factor,—one of the most remarkable situations in history has gradually become defined. With the development of the movement towards the equalisation of economic conditions throughout the world there has emerged into the view of the leading peoples a tendency, inherent in the process from the beginning, compelling capital at an ultimate stage of the process to close with the causes opposing it; and, in a sustained and organised effort, to maintain the process of exploitation in trade and industry in the world at the level of its lowest standards in human life and labour, that is to say, at the standards of the less developed races of mankind.

This is the phase of the problem which has already begun to dimly haunt the consciousness of labour in our civilisation, and which, in a hundred complex forms, already makes itself felt in the international relations of our time. Yet it was the spectacle which the late Charles H. Pearson, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, calmly contemplated as likely to be realised at no distant time, and as the natural and apparently legitimate culmination in practice of the theories of the Manchester school. The day was probably not far distant, he assured us, when we should see the races of our Western civilisation elbowed and hustled, and in large measure superseded, by the yellow races of the world, through the destiny of capital to find in these latter its most effective instruments when it proceeded in due course, and in obedience to its inherent tendencies, to wage the economic