ism, 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 are dependent on the well-to-do classes, so are they completely dependent on countries that support themselves and are able to sell them 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 with other countries; and 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;" and 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.
Till now they have been able to do this. 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.
So that 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; and such blind faith is spreading more and more widely among the majority of Western nations. This faith is a belief that those inventions and improvements for increasing the
