SOCIAL EXPANSION 365 



the organisation of credit systems — all these were dictated by 

 the necessity for expansion of the industrial classes, of those 

 classes which draw their profit from the industrial system. 

 And, in the same way, the laws permitting trade unions ; pro- 

 hibiting female and child-labour, except under certain con- 

 ditions ; granting political rights to the labouring masses — ^these 

 are so many acts which were compelled by the necessity which 

 the labouring classes felt for expansion. The old system of 

 privileges and aristocratic government had its raison d'etre as 

 long as the power of the labouring masses was nothing more than 

 an inert mass, than an unconscious, and therefore negligible, 

 factor ; but if the power of an individual can be inhibited, and 

 can be efEectually prevented from expandiag, it is because of the 

 brief span of life which individual activity has for manifesting itself 

 in. In the case of a society, however, whose life is immeasur- 

 ably longer, that expandiag power must sooner or later break 

 forth, and become irrepressible. Under the old system the life 

 of the masses of the people was not the integral life : it was a 

 life hemmed in on all sides by insurmountable barriers ; but as 

 the power of the masses increased, their need of expansion in- 

 creased simultaneously, and this expanding power was bound 

 to come into conflict with the barriers which obstructed its 

 evolution. 



If this be the case, if every society has a power of expansion 

 which, sooner or later, must manifest itself ; how is it that the 

 inferior races have not expanded, that the negro and the 

 aborigine have not attained to more power ? It seems to us 

 that the reply is obvious. Every race, every society, whose 

 power of expansion is hemmed in by barriers of artificial growth 

 must some day come into conflict with these barriers ; and, if 

 its expansive power be insufficient, if it be inferior to that of the 

 race which has, up till then, held it in bondage^; the race which 

 has just begun to expand will be thrust back in the conflict, and 

 eventually eliminated. The expanding power of the Anda- 



