The Germans have been the pioneers in this field. They were brought to it by the very fact of their immense expansion; from the cities they have gone to the smallest centers and they thus arrive inevitably at the frontiers of the country. Their attempts will be long and difficult; this fact explains, excuses, and will excuse, the errors which have been and will be committed.[15] As long as the peasant shall not be gained over we shall always have behind us this _peasant stupidity_ which unconsciously repeats, and that because it is stupid, the errors of the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December. The development of modern society in Russia will probably proceed on parallel lines with this conquest of the country districts. When that country shall have entered into the liberal era with all its imperfections and all its disadvantages, with all the purely modern forms of exploitation and of proletarization, but also with the compensations and the advantages of the political development of the proletariat, social democracy will no longer have to fear the threat of unforeseen perils from without, and it will at the same time have triumphed over the internal perils by the capture of the peasants. The example of Italy is instructive. This country after having opened the capitalist era dropped out for several centuries from the current history. It is a typical case of decadence which can be studied in a precise fashion from original documents in all its phases. It partly returned into history at the time of the Napoleonic domination. It reconquered its unity and became a modern state after the period of the reaction and conspiracies, and under circumstances known to all, and Italy has ended by having all the vices of parliamentarism, of militarism and of finance without having at the same time the forms of modern production and the resulting capacity for competition on equal terms. It cannot compete with countries where industry is more advanced by reason of the absolute lack of coal and scarcity of iron, the lack of technical ability,--and it is waiting, or hoping now, that the application of electricity may permit it to regain the time lost. It is this which gave the impulse to different attempts from Biella to Schio. A modern state in a society almost exclusively agricultural and in a country where agriculture is in great part backward, it is that which gives birth to this general sentiment of universal discontent.