ession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes
the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at
such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the
country. More than once in the world's history the external semblances
of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just
been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance. In India, for example,
foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races
upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what
result? The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has
kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes. After
India take China. There too history exhibits conquests similar to the
conquest of Europe by the Germans; and there too, more than once, the
barbaric conquerors settled amidst a population of the conquered. What
was the result? The conquered all but absorbed the conquerors, and
changelessness was still the predominant characteristic of the social
condition. In Western Asia, after the invasions of the Turks, the
separation between victors and vanquished remained insurmountable; no
ferment in the heart of society, no historical event, could efface this
first effect of conquest. In Persia, similar events succeeded one
another; different races fought and intermingled; and the end was
irremediable social anarchy, which has endured for ages without any
change in the social condition of the country, without a shadow of any
development of civilization.

So much for Asia. Let us pass to the Europe of the Greeks and Romans.
At the first blush we seem to recognize some analogy between the progress
of these brilliant societies and that of French society; but the analogy
is only apparent; there is, once more, nothing resembling the fact and
the history of the French third estate. One thing only has struck sound
judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle
ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the
plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it
is a baseless comparison. The struggle between the plebeians and
patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was
not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow,
difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a
long course of great inferior