into the circle of modern industry, and even into
great industry, certain notable portions of the country beyond the
Caspian, as an outpost of the approaching acquisition to the sphere of
capitalism of Central Asia and Upper Asia. The gigantic mass of China
appeared to us but a few years ago as motionless in the hereditary
organization of its institutions, so slow is every movement there, while
for ethnic and geographical reasons almost all Africa remained
impenetrable, and, it seemed, even up to the last attempts at conquest
and colonization, that it was destined to offer only its borders to the
process of civilization, as if we were still in the times not even of
the Portuguese, but of the Greeks and Carthaginians.

These differentiations of men on the track of written and unwritten
history seem to us easily explicable when they can be referred to the
natural and immediate conditions which impose limits upon the
development of labor. This is the case with America, which up to the
arrival of the Europeans had but one cereal, maize, and but one domestic
animal for labor, the llama, and we can rejoice that the Europeans
imported with themselves and their tools the ox, the ass and the horse,
corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally the vine and the orange
tree, creating there a new world of that glorious society which produces
merchandise and which with an extraordinary swiftness of movement has
already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery and the most
democratic wage system. But where there is a real halt and even an
attested retrogression, as in Western Asia, in Egypt, in the Balkan
Peninsula and in Northern Africa,--and this arrest cannot be attributed
to the change of natural conditions,--we find the problem before us
which is awaiting its solution from the direct and explicit study of the
social structure studied in the internal modes of its development, as in
the interlacings and complications of the different nations upon that
field which is ordinarily called the scene of historic struggles.

This same civilized Europe, which by the continuity of its tradition,
presents the most complete diagram of its _processus_, so much so that
upon this model have been conceived and constructed, thus far, all the
systems of historical philosophy, this Western and Central Europe, which
produced the epoch of the bourgeoisie and has sought and is seeking to
impose that form of society upon the whole world by diffe