The miracles of the bourgeois epoch, in the unification of the social _processus_, find no parallel in the past. Here are the whole New World, Australia, Northern Africa, and New Zealand! And they all resemble us! And the rebound in the extreme East is made through imitation, and in Africa through conquest! In the presence of this universality and this cosmopolitanism, the acquisition of the Celts and the Iberians to Roman civilization, and of the Germans and that the Slavs to the cycle of Roman Byzantine Christian civilization shrink into insignificance. This ever-growing unification is reflected more every day in the political mechanism of Europe; this mechanism, because founded on the economic conquest of the other parts of the world, oscillates henceforth with the flux and reflux which come from the most distant regions. In this most complicated mingling of action and reactions the war between Japan and China, made with methods imitated, or directly borrowed, from European technique, leaves its traces, deep and far-reaching, in the diplomatic relations of Europe, and still clearer traces in the stock exchange, which is the faithful interpreter of the consciousness of our time. This Europe, mistress of all the rest of the world, has recently seen the relations of the politics of the states of which it is composed oscillate in consequence of a revolt in the Transvaal, and in consequence of the ill success of the Italian armies in Abyssinia in these last days.[30] The centuries which have prepared and carried to its present form the economic domination of bourgeois production have also developed the tendency to a unification of history under a general view; and in this fashion we find explained and justified the ideology of progress, which fills so many books of the philosophy of history and of _Kulturgeschichte_. The unity of social form, that is to say, the unity of the capitalistic form of production, to which the bourgeoisie has tended for centuries, is reflected in the conception of the unity of history in more suggestive forms than the mind could ever have received from the narrow cosmopolitanism of the Roman empire or the one-sided cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church.