CHAPTER V

CONSUMMATION AND DESTRUCTION—THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

i. Fulfilments
From many points ' of view the Nineteenth Century, the
Century of the Will, as we have called it, is the time of the fulfil-
ment of all previous centuries of Western history* It saw the
fulfilment of the world domination of the West that started in
Europe. At the end of it two continents had been settled by
Europeans, a third made dependent and partially settled, the
East flung open and dotted with Western strong-points. Year by
year a mighty stream of people poured forth from Europe in
hundreds of thousands into the unlocked spaces of the globe, a
stream that kept these annexations and infiltrations suffused with
living blood. In the earth-spanning single whole that had thus
sprung up there whirred a gigantic centrifuge, which extended its
radius with every beat—world capitalism. It deposited people far
and wide, threw open areas of raw materials, supplied them with
goods and capital investments, correlatively with this piled up
greater and greater concentrations of people in its expanding
centres of industry in England, Germany and North America,
supplied them in their turn with commodities and profits thanks
to the expanding areas of raw materials and emigration, con-
tinually intensifying the inner concentrations of population and
enlarging the orbits of expansion, the one always conditioning
the further progress of the other and so on ad infinitum.
Thus an unprecedented, dynamic world-totality arose, at once
fulfilment and something entirely new, in the place of that world
which the European forces of capitalism and the State had been
throwing open, slowly, bit by bit, ever since the Sixteenth
Century—the world of illimitable horizons where, even in
Goethe's time, Alexis took touching leave of Dora as if for all
eternity, when he set forth on his travels. Not, as yet, a new star,
but an infinitely smaller earth had come into being, overspread
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