The longer representative government lasted and the more it extended, the more did the Western nations abandon agriculture and devote their mental and physical powers to manufacturing and trading in order to supply luxuries to the wealthy classes, to enable the nations to fight one another, and to deprave the undepraved.  Thus, in England, which has had representative government longest, less than one-seventh of the adult male population is now employed in agriculture, one-half of the population in Germany and France, and a similar number in other states.  At the present time the position of these states is such that, even if they could free themselves from the calamity of proletarianism, they could not support themselves independently of other countries.  All these nations are unable to subsist by their own toil.  And, just as the proletariat is dependent on the well-to-do classes, it is also completely dependent on countries that support it and are able to sell it their surplus, such as India, Russia, or Australia.  England supports from its own land less than a fifth of its population, and Germany less than half, as is the case with France and other countries.  The condition of these nations becomes year-by-year more dependent on the food supplied from abroad.

In order to exist, these nations must have recourse to the deceptions and violence called in their language “acquiring markets” and “colonial policy.”  They act accordingly, striving to throw their nets of enslavement farther and farther to all ends of the earth, to catch those who are still leading rational lives.  Vying with one another, they increase their armaments more and more, and more and more cunningly, under various pretexts, seize the land of those who still live rational lives, and force these people to feed them.

They have been able to do this until now.  But the limit to the acquirement of markets, to the deception of buyers, to the sale of unnecessary and injurious articles, and to the enslavement of distant nations, is already apparent.  The peoples of distant lands are themselves becoming depraved, are learning to make for themselves all those articles which the Western nations supplied them with, and are, above all, learning the not very cunning science of arming themselves, and of being as cruel as their teachers.

Thus, the end of such immoral existence is already in sight.  The people of the Western nations see this coming, and feeling unable to stop in their career, comfort themselves (as people half aware that they are ruining their lives always do) by self-deception and blind faith.  Such blind faith is spreading more and more widely among most of Western nations.  This faith is a belief that those inventions and improvements for increasing the comforts of the wealthy classes and for fighting (that is, slaughtering men), which the enslaved masses have been forced to produce for several generations, are something very important and almost holy, called, in the language of those who uphold such a mode of life, “culture,” or even more grandly, “civilization.”

Just as every creed has a science of its own, so this faith in “civilization” has a science: sociology, the one aim of which is to justify the false and desperate position in which the people of the Western world now find themselves.  The object of this science is to prove that all these inventions – ironclads, telegraphs, nitroglycerine bombs, photographs, electric railways, and all sorts of similar foolish and nasty inventions that stupefy the people and are designed to increase the comforts of the idle classes and to protect them by force – not only represent something good, but even something sacred, predetermined by supreme unalterable laws.  Therefore, they consider that the depravity they call “civilization” is a necessary condition of human life, and must inevitably be adopted by all mankind.

This faith is just as blind as any other faith, just as unshakable, and just as self-assured.  Any other position may be disputed and argued about, but “civilization” – meaning those inventions and those forms of life among which we are living, and all the follies and nastiness that we produce – is an indubitable blessing, beyond all discussion.  Everything that disturbs faith in civilization is a lie, and everything that supports this faith is a sacred truth.

This faith and its attendant science cause the Western nations not to wish to see or to acknowledge that the ruinous path they are following leads to inevitable destruction.  The so-called “most advanced” among them cheer themselves with the thought that they can reach, not destruction, but the highest bliss without abandoning this path.  They assure themselves that, by again employing violence such as brought them to their present ruinous condition, somehow or other, from among people now striving to obtain the greatest material, animal welfare for themselves, men (influenced by Socialist doctrines) will suddenly appear.  These men will wield power without being depraved by it, and will establish an order of things in which people accustomed to a greedy, selfish struggle for their own profit will suddenly grow self-sacrificing, work together for the common good, and share alike.

But this creed, having no reasonable foundation, has lately more and more lost credibility among thinking people.  It is now held only by the laboring masses, whose eyes it diverts from the miseries of the present, giving them some a sort of hope in a blissful future.

Such is the common faith of most of the Western nations, drawing them towards destruction.  And this tendency is so strong that the voices of the wise among them, such as Rousseau, Lamennais, Carlyle, Ruskin, Channing, Garrison, Emerson, Herzen, and Edward Carpenter leave no trace in the consciousness of those who, though rushing towards destruction, do not wish to see or admit it.

And it is to travel this path of destruction that the Russian people arc now invited by European politicians, who are delighted that one more nation should join them in their desperate plight.  Frivolous Russians urge us to follow this path, considering it much easier and simpler, instead of thinking with their own heads, slavishly to imitate what the Western nations did centuries ago, before they knew whither it would lead.