even the most extreme, of our history.

Russia could not have advanced, as it is now advancing, toward the great
industry, without drawing from Western Europe, and especially from our
charming French _Chauvinism_, that money which she would in vain have
sought within her own borders, that is to say, from the conditions of
her obese territorial mass, where vegetate in ancient economic forms
fifty million peasants. Russia, in order to become an economic modern
society ripening the conditions of a corresponding political revolution,
and preparing the means which will facilitate the addition of a large
part of Asia to the capitalist movement, has been led to destroy the
last relics of agrarian communism (whether its origins be primitive or
secondary) which had been preserved within herself up to this point in
such characteristic forms and on so large a scale. Russia must
capitalize herself, and to this end she must, to start with, convert
land into merchandise capable of producing merchandise, and at the same
time transform into miserable proletarians the excommunists of the
land. And, on the contrary, in Western and Central Europe we find
ourselves at the opposite point of the series of development which has
scarcely begun in Russia. Here, with us, where the bourgeoisie, with
varied fortunes and triumphing over such a variety of difficulties, has
already traversed so many stages of its development, it is not the
recollection of primitive or secondary communism, which scarcely
survives through learned combinations in the heads of scholars, but the
very form of bourgeois production, which engenders in the proletarians
the tendency to socialism, which presents itself in its general outlines
as an indication of a new phase of history and not as the repetition of
what is inevitably perishing in the Slavonic countries under our eyes.

Who could fail to see in these illustrations, which I have not sought
out, but which have come almost by chance, and which can be indefinitely
prolonged in a volume of economic-political geography of the present
world, the evident proof of the manner in which historic conditions are
all circumstanced in the forms of their development? Not only races and
peoples, nations and states, but parts of nations and various regions of
states, even orders and classes, are found, as it were, upon so many
rounds of a very long ladder, or, rather, upon the various points of a
complicated and slowly developing