[J] Had we the space, a detailed exposition of this exceptional development of a feudal state would be tempting. China would be well worth a more detailed discussion, since, in many aspects it has approached the condition of “free citizenship” more closely than any people of Western Europe. China has overcome the consequences of the feudal system more thoroughly than we Europeans have; and has made, early in its development, the great property interests in the land harmless, so that their bastard offspring, capitalism, hardly came into being; while in addition, it has worked out to a considerable degree the problems of coöperative production and of coöperative distribution.
The outcome here spoken of means the further development of the primitive feudal state, a matter of importance to our understanding of universal history as a _process_. The principal lines of development into which this issue branches off are twofold and of fundamentally different character. _But this polar opposition is conditioned by a like contrast between two sorts of economic wealth each of which increases in accordance with the “law of agglomeration about existing nuclei.”_ In the one case, it is movable property; in the other, landed property. Here it is the capital of commerce, there property in land, accumulating in the hands of a smaller and smaller number, and thereby overturning radically the articulation of classes, and with it the whole State.
The maritime State is the scene of the development of movable wealth; the territorial State is the embodiment of the development of landed property. The final issue of the first is _capitalistic exploitation_ by slavery, the outcome of the latter is, first of all, the _developed feudal State_.
Capitalistic exploitation by slavery, the typical result of the development of the so-called “antique States” on the Mediterranean, does not end in the death of states, which is of no importance, but in the death of peoples, because of the consumption of population. In the pedigree of the historical development of the State, it forms a side branch, from which no further immediate growth can take place.
The developed feudal State, however, represents the principal branch, the continuation of the trunk; and is therefore the origin for the further growth of the State. Thence it has developed into the State governed by feudal systems; into absolutism; into the modern constitutional State; and if we are right in our prognosis, it will become a “free citizenship.”