rent modes of
conquest, direct or indirect,--this Europe is not completely uniform in
the degree of its development, and its various agglomerations, national,
local and political, appear disturbed, as it were, over a decidedly
sloping ladder. Upon these differences depend the conditions of relative
superiority and inferiority of one country to another and the reasons,
more or less advantageous or disadvantageous, for economic exchange;
and thereon have depended, and still depend, not only the frictions and
the struggles, the treaties and the wars, but also everything that with
more or less precision the political writers have been able to relate to
us since the Renaissance, and certainly with increasing evidence, from
Louis XIV. and Colbert to our own time.

This Europe in itself is highly variegated. Here is the consummate
flower of industrial and capitalist production, namely, England, while
at other points survives the artisan, vigorous or rickety, at Paris and
at Naples, to grasp the fact in its extreme points. Here the land is
almost industrialized, as in England; and elsewhere vegetates, in
various traditional forms, the stupid peasant, as in Italy and in
Austria, and in the latter country more than in the former. In one
country the political life of the state--suited to the prosaic
consciousness of a bourgeoisie which knows its business because it has
conquered the space that it occupies--is exerted in the surest and most
open fashion of an explicit class domination (it will be understood that
I am speaking of France). Elsewhere, and particularly in Germany, the
old feudal customs, the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the cowardice of
a bourgeoisie which exploits favorable economic circumstances without
bringing to them either intelligence or revolutionary courage,
strengthen the existing state by preserving the lying appearances of an
ethical mission to be accomplished. (With how many unpalatable sauces
this state ethics, Prussian into the bargain, has been served up by the
heavy and pedantic German professors!) Here and there modern capitalist
production is edging its way into countries which from other points of
view do not enter into our movement and especially into its political
side, as is the case with unhappy Poland; or again this form only
penetrates indirectly, as in the Slavonic countries. But now comes the
sharpest contrast, which seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an
epitome, all the phrases,