dreams to the evolutionist who has once perceived the nature of the process in which human development is involved that the direction of advance in Western history is, therefore, again to subordinate all human activities, as in the ancient civilisations, to the social consciousness as expressed through the State. The real secret of our Western world — the cause, as we shall see directly, of all its extraordinary and ever-growing efficiency in history-consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the controlling centre of the evolutionary process therein has been at last projected altogether beyond the content of political consciousness. We are living, in short, in Western history in the midst of a movement in which through the whole realm of art, of ethics, of literature, of philosophy, of politics, and of religion, there runs the undertone of a cosmic struggle in which now, not only the individual and all his powers, but society itself, with all its aims and efforts, is being slowly broken to the ends of a social efficiency no longer included within the limits of political consciousness. It is in the processes of this struggle, the single acts of which extend themselves over centuries, that Natural Selection is discriminating between the living, the dying, and the dead among modern peoples. It is a world in which, with the passing of the present under the control of the future, there is being accom plished for the first time in the development of the race the emancipation of the future in the present. 1 This is the idea against which Mr. Herbert Spencer may be per ceived to be struggling in the Essays included in The Man versus the State. It is the world, therefore, in which all the imperiums in which the present had hitherto strangled the interests of the greater future, are in process of slow disintegration, and in which we have, in consequence, entered upon an era of such a free rivalry of forces as has never been before in the history of the race. It is to the consideration of such a world that we have now to address ourselves. There are, proceeding from the conditions here described, two leading facts of our time, the significance of which will in all probability be fully visible within a century to come. The first is, that the leading place in our civilisation has passed to the peoples amongst whom there has first been accomplished this result of the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process out of the present in the long-drawn-out struggle which has here been described. The other result, already becoming visible beneath the profoundly complex life of the United States of America, constitutes probably the most pregnant and remarkable fact in modern history. It is that the actual life centre of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation has been definitely shifted for the present within the pale of the activities of these peoples. CHAPTER X THE MODERN WORLD-CONFLICT As soon as the mind has endeavoured to realise the nature of the position outlined in the last chapter, it is impossible to avoid receiving a deep impression of the significance of its bearing on the complex movement of development, which, under many phases, is unfolding itself beneath our eyes in the modern worldprocess. If we have been right so far, we appear to have in sight a single controlling principle, the operation of which divides, as by a clear line of demarcation, the meaning of the era in which we are living from that of all the past history of the race. We are regarding an integrating process, the larger meaning of which is still in the future, the first stage of which has occupied nearly two thousand years, and into the influence of which all the tendencies of development in our civilisation are being slowly and increasingly drawn. The impression made at first sight on the mind by the character of the position reached loses nothing on reflection. On the contrary, the tendency is rather for it to grow and deepen as the nature of the transition in which the future is being emancipated in history is better understood. In the modern conflict between tendencies in ethics, in the State, in government, in national development, and in universal politics, it is the meaning of the struggle between the future and the present which weights all the processes of the intellect and all the developments of history. The races and peoples who are competitors in the struggle may have any theory they please of their interests, or of the ends or ideals of politics or of government. But, if the principle of Projected Efficiency be accepted as operating in society in the conditions described, then in respect of none of these alone will they retain their places in the conflict. The winning conditions in the struggle are determined. They are those of the people who already most efficiently bear on their shoulders in the present, the burden of the principles with which the meaning of a process infinite in the future is identified. Let us see, therefore, if we can follow, into the midst of the current life of the time, the application of that principle under which we see the ascendency of the present moving now towards its challenge throughout the whole range of the modern world-conflict. - that is If the mind is fixed on that period of Western history which begins at the point up to which we had advanced with the close of the last chapter to say, with the opening of the eighteenth century, and which thence extends down into the midst of the time in which we are living - there are certain features of the epoch embraced which immediately arrest attention. Between the dates mentioned there is included an interval of time so altogether remarkable in results that to institute any real parallel between it and a previous period of history is impossible. It may be imagined that at the beginning of the eighteenth century it must have appeared to the reflective mind, that, so far as progress in the arts and sciences and in general material results were concerned, the interval which, up to that time, had been placed between our civilisation and that of the ancient Roman world had not been, on the whole, very considerable. Yet since that time—that is to say, during a brief period of some two hundred years-our Western world has been transformed. The increase in natural resources, in wealth, in population, and in the distance which has been placed between our modern civilisation and any past condition of the race, has been enormous. During the last half of this period, that is to say, during the nineteenth century alone, while the population of the rest of the world remained nearly stationary, the actual numbers of the European peoples rose from 170,000,000 to 500,000,000.1 The impetus from which this increase proceeded continues, moreover, to be so immense that we may even accept the assertion that there is “a reasonable probability that, unless some great internal change should take place in the ideas and conduct of the European races themselves, this population of 500,000,000 will in another century become one of 1,500,000,000 to 2,000,000,000";2 the remainder of the population of the world being, so far as can be seen, destined to remain comparatively stationary. These figures are to be taken only as an index to the stupendous changes which have taken place, and which are still in progress, beneath the surface of life and thought throughout the entire fabric of our civilisation. It matters not in what direction we look, the character of the revolution which has been effected is 1 Address to the Manchester Statistical Society, October 1900, by Sir Robert Giffen, see p. 15. 2 Ibid. |