Principles of western civilisation

I THE CLOSE OF AN ERA 21

party with which the cause of progress is identified that we realise to the full the nature of the situation with which Western Liberalism is beginning to find itself confronted in our civilisation.

The leading fact in Western history, which has accompanied the development of the intellectual theory of society here described, has been the passing of the political and economic life of the Englishspeaking peoples, under the dominance of the ideas of that school of political and economic theory which has come to be generally known in our time as the Manchester school. Although many of the theories with which this school of thought accompanied its teaching, and in particular the doctrine of international trade with which its name_became associated in England, have failed to obtain general acceptance outside of Great Britain, the significance of the school is not to be judged from this fact. It is the general spirit of the ideas from which its fundamental premises were developed that has become the dominant influence in the modern epoch of commercialism throughout our civilisation.

The central and most characteristic conception of the Manchester school, to which all others were related, may be briefly stated. It was the principle of /azssez-faire competition as applied consistently through the phases of the economic process in society; first of all to the relations of capital to labour, then to the relations to each other of competing industries and undertakings within the State, and finally—in the form in which the conception was accepted in England—to the processes of international trade throughout the world. In the ideal condition of social order which was contemplated,