GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

746 ETHICS AND POLITICS: TUB MODERNS
which the social relations between human beings happen to
have been cast at a particular stage in the evolution of our
species. 1 This, the national, form of organization, is already
beginning to wear the appearance of an anachronism* Increasingly
the world becomes a single economic unit, with
the result that events which happen in any part of it tend to
produce reverberations in all parts of it Thus a lady living
in a Bournemouth boarding-house is unable to pay her
bill because a strike in a Japanese silk factory has wiped
out her dividends, while coal-miners in South Wales are
thrown out of employment by the tapping of oil wells in
Persia. To take another example, die waning of the
Victorian taste for mahogany furniture has brought
economic hardship to British Honduras, whose chief export
was mahogany. Since mahogany went out of fashion, the
white population of British Honduras has halved, while
of those who remain have fallen victims to con-
many
sumption*
Because of ine growing economic inter-dependence of
mankind, the forces which determine events are increasingly
set in motion by factors of which the national State hat
little cognizance. Thus the inability of nations to control
the events which affect their destinies gives to much recent
history a determinist appearance. So vast are the contemporary
political and economic fields, so far-reaching
the forces which determine current history, that, so far
from controlling, statesmen seem unable even to understand
them. Reflecting upon the history of the past twenty
years, one is driven to adopt the interpretation of
phenomena with which Thomas Hard/* philosophy has
made us familiar, and to contemplate, as he does in The
Dynasts, events moving to their predestined conclusions
unaffected by the cerebrations of statesmen in council Of
the major events of this periodthe War, the Coal Strike,
the General Strike of 1906, the growth of unemployment,
the economic collapse of 1929, the financial crisis of 1931
few have been such as human beings have willed. Most
>S pp. 7*7, 728 above.