r of
production which already holds a notable place in the competition of the
world's market, there still live, like fossils of prehistoric times, the
Australian aborigines, capable only of disappearing, but incapable of
adapting themselves to a civilization which was not imported among them,
but next to them. In America, and especially in North America, the
series of events which have brought on the development of modern society
began with the importation from Europe of domestic animals and
agricultural tools, the use of which in ancient times gave birth to the
slow moving civilization of the Mediterranean; but this movement
remained entirely inside the circle of those descended from the
conquerors and colonists, while the aborigines are lost in the mass
through the intermingling of races or perish and disappear completely.
Western Asia and Egypt, which already in very ancient times, as the
first cradle of all our civilization, gave birth to the great
semi-political formations which marked the first phases of certain and
positive history, have appeared to us for centuries as crystallizations
of social forms incapable of moving on of themselves to new phases of
development. Upon them is the age-long weight of the barbaric camp--the
dominion of the Turk. Into this stiffened mass is introduced by secret
ways a modern administration, and in the name of business interests the
railroads and the telegraphs push in,--bold outposts of the conquering
European bank. All this stiffened mass has no hope of resuming life,
heat and motion except by the ruin of the Turkish dominion, for which
are being substituted in the different methods of direct and indirect
conquest the dominion and the protectorate of the European bourgeoisie.
That a process of transformation of backward nations or of nations
arrested in their march, can be realized and hastened under external
influences, India stands as a proof. This country, with its own life
still surviving, re-enters vigorously under the action of England into
the circulation of international activity even with its intellectual
products. These are not the only contrasts in the historic physiognomy
of our contemporaries. And while in Japan, by an acute and spontaneous
phenomenon of imitation, there has developed, in less than thirty years,
a certain assimilation of western civilization which is already moving
normally the country's own energies, the forcible law of Russian
conquest is dragging