To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country
of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting
in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the
idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes
this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the
genius of Europe is active and creative; it resists caste by culture;
its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions,
trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in
boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system,
the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight
in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece,
had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled
by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw before them
no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London;
no pitiless subdivision of classes,--the doom of the pinmakers, the
doom of the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of
spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste, superinduced by
the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its
health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the
Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in
architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult
than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills
at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted.
The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons
of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat,
steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the
ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.