THE WORLD REVOLUTION 83 



drawn. The causes which have driven labour to 

 organization within recent times have been irre- 

 sistible. But causes operating with a similar 

 intensity have at the same time been driving 

 capital into a position in which all the landmarks 

 of the past are one by one disappearing from view. 

 The enfranchising tendencies in the life of the 

 West have gradually set in motion tidal movements 

 in civilization in which the social emotion is sub- 

 merging all the fixed points of the past. But there 

 is no indication whatever on the thought or activity 

 of the time that the power-holding interests in 

 civilization have any clear grasp of the situation 

 in which they are involved. We see them rather 

 everywhere falling back instinctively upon positions 

 calculated to give them command in an environment 

 of force if the struggle should resolve itself into one 

 for mastery under more primitive conditions. 



In the old individualistic age of the past capital- 

 ism had come to rest in large part on the convenient 

 maxims of a science of political economy which 

 identified the operations of capital with the per- 

 manent public weal. But the spokesmen of capital 

 have on the whole shown no consciousness that the 

 foundations of this world have moved bodily in our 

 time. As the demand of the proletariat in the 

 modern class war has threatened to become nothing 

 3 



