VI.
The States of Western Europe, externally very powerful, may now crush the Chinese army; but the position of the people living in these States not only cannot be compared with the position of the Chinese, but, on the contrary, it is most calamitous. Amongst all these nations there unceasingly proceeds a strife between the destitute, exasperated working people and the Government and wealthy, a strife which is restrained only by coercion on the part of deceived men who constitute the Army; a similar strife is continually waging between the different States demanding endlessly increasing armaments, a strife which is any moment ready to plunge into the greatest catastrophes. But however dreadful this state of things may be, it does not constitute the essence of the calamity of the Western nations. Their chief and fundamental calamity is that the whole life of these nations who are unable to furnish themselves with food, is entirely based on the necessity of procuring means of sustenance by violence and cunning from other nations, who, like China, India, Russia and others, still preserve a rational agricultural life.
And it is these parasitical nations and their activity that you are invited to imitate by the men of the Reform party!
Constitutions, protective tariffs, standing armies, all this together has rendered the Western nations what they are—people who have abandoned agriculture and become unused to it, occupied in towns and factories in the production of articles for the most part unnecessary, people who with their armies are adapted only to every kind of violence and robbery. However brilliant their position may appear at first sight, it is a desperate one, and they must inevitably perish if they do not change the whole, structure of their life, founded as it now is on deceit and the plunder and pillage of the agricultural nations.
To imitate Western nations, being frightened by their insolence a and power, would be the same as if a rational undepraved industrious man were to imitate a spendthrift insolent ruffian who has lost the habit of work and was assaulting him, i.e. in order to
