The Poverty of Nations
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITHis on leave from his post as Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard to serve as our ambassador in India. To his responsibility as a diplomat he brings the training and acumen of an economist; and in his current assignment he has become increasingly sensitive to the key problem in the newly developing nations — poverty, and how it is to be alleviated.
THE ATLANTIC
BY JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
AMONG the enterprises currently attracting the energies of man, one of considerable moment is his effort to launch himself across space. A second, less grand, less costly, but not perhaps less important, is the effort to improve the position of those who will stay behind. My purpose in this article is to consider the way in which we are tackling the second of these tasks, our performance in comparison with that of others, and the possibility for improvement. That such a possibility exists is evident from a fairly cursory comparison of the conquest of poverty with the conquest of space.
Space travel, we take for granted, will be undertaken only after the most comprehensive consideration of the problem to be solved. In the case of a journey to the moon, the energy requisite for escape from the earth, protection from radiation, extremes of temperature, tedium and other hazards and discomforts en route, the arrangement of an unclimactic arrival, provision for a return journey by those unattracted by permanent settlement, and, quite literally, a thousand other things are all, one is assured, the subject of the most minute calculation. Nor is anything that is vital slighted because of a shortage of money. The knowledge that such care is being exercised will, one imagines, lessen, even if it does not eliminate, the misgivings of the first passengers.
Our approach to national poverty, by contrast, is more casual. All prophets of the commonplace aver that something should be done about it. But, remarkably, we have no agreed view or even any strong consensus as to why it exists. Over the last two centuries we have had an active and increasingly sophisticated discussion of the forces which influence economic growth — that is to say, the factors making for increases in total and per capita income and well-being. Without exception, this discussion — of incentives to effort, means for encouraging saving and capital formation, ways of promoting technological advance — applies to societies that are already in process of growth. But the central feature of the poverty-ridden community is the absence of any tendency to improvement. There is stagnation in output and income, and this perpetuates itself year after year and from generation to generation. One cannot extend the analysis of the advancing society to this stagnation. And of the stagnation, we have no analysis.
What we do have is a large — in fact, an astonishing — number of assumptions as to what is wrong. It is upon these assumptions, many of them self-contradictory and all of them of limited applicability, that we have based remedial action. One consequence of our planning is that within the next few years men will reach the moon, and hopefully the righteous will return, but the most acute problem of this planet will remain unsolved. If this seems pessimistic, let me list the causes to which, depending on ideology, personal preference, convenience, and even pure accident, we now attribute the poverty of nations and to which we relate our remedies.
1. The people are poor because they prefer it that way. Poverty, in more formidable language, reflects the value system of the people.
This is persuasive. Few Americans have looked at an Asian or African country without reflecting (and commenting) on the favorable effect of a little American drive. Nor is the tendency ours alone. Visitors to the central Asian republics of the Soviet Union are told by Russians that the local people are backward because they are lacking in ambition. Yet there is scarcely a country in the world where people do not want economic improvement, where, indeed, it is not a political imperative. We must also remember that Kipling’s Englishman dismissed the sorry state of the undeveloped country with an easy wave of his hand and the observation: “The natives are bloody lazy, you know.” When it is so couched, we indignantly reject such spurious anthropology.
2. The country is naturally poor.
This seems the obvious answer where the soil is sparse and unwatered, the forests thin and the subsoil barren. How could Bedouin or Navaho be rich? But this is an explanation which badly explains the wealth of Switzerland or the relative wealth of Israel, both states that are poor in natural resources. It leads one to wonder why West Virginians, who live in a state phenomenally rich in natural resources, should have incomes far below those of the arid and barren West.
3. The country is poor because it has been kept in a state of colonial oppression.
Over great parts of the world, this is the most evocative of explanations. The British, French, and Dutch were in business not for their subject peoples but for themselves. So the people still pay for these centuries of indifference, exploitation, and neglect. Moreover, in an awkward inversion of historical process, the least progressive of the colonial regimes have, on the whole, lasted the best. The greatest neglect or oppression is being the longest endured. Yet, again, there are obvious difficulties. In many parts of the world— Latin America comes immediately to mind —colonialism is far in the past, but poverty continues. And elsewhere — in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United States — colonial rule did not exclude a considerable measure of contemporary prosperity. British India, the part of India where British rule was the most comprehensive and lasted the longest time, is today measurably the most progressive part of the subcontinent.
4. Poverty is the consequence of class exploitation.
The counterpart of the poverty of the many is the opulence of the few. The second is the cause of the first. This explanation is supported by a formidable dialectic and confirmed by arithmetic and observation. Few poor countries are without a minority of exceedingly rich. And it is difficult to understand why an Andean or Middle Eastern peasant should seek to enhance his income by irrigation, improved seed, or acceptable livestock when he knows that anything in excess of subsistence will be appropriated by the landlord, tax collector, moneylender, or merchant. Yet the world has much poverty without evident exploiters. In India and Pakistan there are millions of small landowning peasants who are very poor but whose poverty cannot be related to the enrichment of any landlord, moneylender, tax collector, or other visible oppressor,
5. Poverty is caused by insufficient capital.
This seems self-evident. Low income allows of no saving. Without saving there is nothing to invest. Without investment there can be no economic advance, and so poverty is self-perpetuating. Yet in several countries of the Middle East, as also in South America — Venezuela is particularly a case in point — oil provides a rich source of revenue and capital is not scarce. But the vast majority of the people remain exceedingly poor.
6. Overpopulation is the cause of poverty.
In the typical village of India, as elsewhere in Asia, there is rarely enough work to go around. Fewer hands could and would do the same work. If the population were smaller, each person would have a greater share. Yet elsewhere, if some of the people were spirited away to another planet, per capita income would not rise. Everyone works at full capacity for the little he gets. If the individual went, so would his contribution. Since others could produce no more, the share of each would remain the same. And, as a matter of practical observation, though poverty is often associated with dense population, it is also often associated with sparse population. The Amazon Basin is very sparsely populated and very poor. Southern Brazil is much more densely populated and much more prosperous.
7. Poverty is caused by incompetent economic policy.
The poor country, it is argued, is infirm in its commitment to free enterprise. Alternatively, it has not seen the inevitability of socialism. Inflation is the enemy of economic advance. Alternatively, the fault lies with excessively orthodox efforts to stabilize prices and currency.
Experience in the less developed lands certainly induces respect for well-considered economic policy. But it is evident that the foregoing explanations of poverty involve an awkward element of internal contradiction. Moreover, the most prominent fact about the very poor country is not that it has free-enterprise industry or socialist industry but that it has no industry at all. And inflation which is chronic, especially in Latin America, is invariably a symptom of more deeply seated disorders. Specifically, too much income is being claimed by people who contribute nothing to the total. Until their claims are curbed, inflation is probably less to be feared than stabilization.
8. Poverty is caused by ignorance.
There is, it is a plausible axiom, no largely literate population in the world which is really poor and no illiterate population that is otherwise. Yet here one encounters the question of how a poor and illiterate people goes about providing itself with a school system. Whence will come the resources? Poverty is a cause of ignorance, but also a result.
THIS list of commonly accepted causes of poverty is by no means complete. We regularly attribute some role to the slow rate of transfer of technological knowledge. People are backward; they cling to primitive and poverty-inducing methods of agriculture and industry because they have not been apprised of anything better or prefer it that way. We attribute something to war, rapine, predacity, and civil disorder. Alaric, the Fourth Crusade, Genghis Khan, and the brothers Pizarro showed that these, in the hands of qualified practitioners, can have an enduring effect on income. Communities which were the principal objects of their attention have been poor ever since.
One could go on. But the point is sufficiently clear. We have a great many causes of poverty, nearly all in some measure convincing and all partially unconvincing. Such is our diagnosis. Yet to prescribe on the basis of any one of these causes must obviously be dangerous. If ignorance is the cause of poverty, to provide capital for power plants or plows will miss the point. If poverty is caused by the oppression of landlords, provision of improved seed will do no good. Why reform one’s farming for the benefit of somebody in Lima, Quito, or Paris? It is pointless to urge a population policy if overpopulation is not the problem. But all other gains can obviously be annulled if overpopulation is the problem. It does no good to control inflation if stabilization serves only to reveal the underlying problems of the society in even harsher form. So long as we have no diagnosis of national poverty, we can have no cure.
Something can be done, however. It is useful, first of all, to see national poverty as the product of a plurality of causes. And several causes will normally operate in any country. These will vary with culture and historical antecedents. So we should expect that between Latin America, the Asian subcontinent, Africa, the Middle East, the difference in the admixture of cause will be very great. Any argument over the causes of poverty can readily be resolved by agreeing that all are tight.
If we recognize a diversity of causes, we will take an eclectic view of remedies. This means that we will not allow dogma to govern prescription. One of our advantages, potentially at least, over the Soviet design for economic development is a greater freedom from controlling doctrine. Hence we have a greater capacity to adjust remedies to cause. We must protect that advantage.
We can also avoid selecting remedies for their convenience. There are some presumptive remedies for poverty that come much more readily to hand than others. Technical assistance in the form of improved seed or advice on cooperatives is easier to provide to farmers than land reform. A hydroelectric power project is much easier to launch than a sound system of elementary education. To provide an effective system of public administration for people newly emerging from colonial rule — in the Congo, for example — is a peculiarly baffling task. Yet if a bad land system, mass illiteracy, a corrupt, incompetent, or exiguous public administration, or all three, are what is wrong, the provision of technical aid or the damming of rivers will do little good. If technicians and capital are the real shortages, provision of technicians and capital will do great good.
Such are the gains of examining each case on its merits. Yet some generalization about the problem of national poverty is inescapable. In pleading for a clinical examination of each country, one could easily be urging endless study and accompanying delay in a world that is clamoring for action. And there is one generalization that is reasonably safe. People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to disregard the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have now reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Similarly, the Alliance for Progress has recognized that economic liberation is the first step to economic advance. Until people have a part in economic progress, there will be no economic progress. It will take time to convince everyone, both at home and abroad, of this often inconvenient fact. Some will continue to urge that no boat be rocked or that we buy our way around reform. Others will continue to hope that privilege, however disastrous, will at least last out their own lifetimes. Nevertheless, one senses a growing recognition that social justice is indispensable for social progress.
This is very modest reassurance. The space travelers are well ahead of those who grovel in the problems of this planet when it comes to the techniques of problem solving. In the attack on poverty, we should, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, be modest and realize that we have much to be modest about. I turn now to a more specific consideration of the choice facing the country in search of progress.
YOUNG nations emerging today from colonialism and the thrall of poverty are faced with the need to select an economic system. The choice, one from which the developing nations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were conveniently exempt, is between the economic, political, and constitutional arrangements generally associated with the Western democracies on the one hand and the polity and economic organization which avows its debt to Marx and the Russian Revolution on the other.
These are not, as everyone knows, homogeneous alternatives. Poland, where the agriculture — and hence, close to half the economy — remains in private hands and subject to market influences, differs radically in economic structure from the far more completely socialized economy of the Chinese mainland. In Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and India, the word “socialism” is politically evocative. As a result, politicians try to find as much of it as possible. In the United States, measures that would elsewhere be identified with socialist enlightenment — social security, agricultural price guarantees, even the public development of public power sites — are defended as making private enterprise function better.
Also, one must be cautious in speaking of a choice. Geography and the proximity of military power have had much to do with the decision. Had Poland, to select a country not unaccustomed to movement, been more radically relocated after World War II to, say, the position of Paraguay, its political reorientation would have been, perhaps, 179 degrees. Individuals commit themselves as a matter of free choice to a Marxian political and economic design. But nations have rarely done so in the normal course of unmanaged elections, a reluctance which was foreseen by both Marx and Lenin.
Nevertheless, the broad alternatives exist. My purpose now is to weigh their advantages from the standpoint of the developing country. I am aware that an American ambassador will not be considered by everyone a wholly impartial judge, and there would doubtless be eyebrow lifting by some captious people if my evidence were to lead me to the wrong conclusion.
But the choice merits serious assessment. The bulk of the present literature on economic development consists of proclamations of superiority by one side or the other. We share fully with the Communists a faith in the persuasive value of robust assertion. Were the advantage all on our side, we would have no reason to worry. But we do worry, and a moderately unemotional appraisal of what we have to offer the developing country, as compared with the Communists, might even be therapeutically useful.
The goal of the developing country, we remind ourselves, is to bring itself as rapidly as possible into the twentieth century, and with the apparatus of individual and group well-being — food, clothing, education, health services, housing, entertainment, and automobiles — which are associated in every mind, urban and rural, bourgeois and Bolshevist, with twentieth-century existence. A few, but only a few, demur. Not even the most monastic Christian, the most contemplative Buddhist, or the most devout Gandhian is completely secure against the charms of the bicycle, motor scooter, or transistor radio.
Differences between the two broad designs for development are not difficult to detect. The problem is to identify those that are decisive, that make the difference between change and stagnation, success and failure. Of these critical differences there are two, or perhaps three. The first is in the diagnosis of the causes of poverty and the related remedy. The second is in the way development is organized. The third is in the political and constitutional environment of development. I now take up these differences.
Each of the systems drastically simplifies the causes of poverty and then proceeds on the basis of these simpler causes. In the Marxian view, poverty is caused principally by institutions which chain the country to its past — which hold it in colonial subjection, allow the exploitation and subjugation of the masses, deny the people the reward of their labor, make government not the efficient servant of the many but the corrupt handmaiden of the few, and which, in the aggregate, make any important progress impossible.
In the predominant Western view, the poor are the victims of their poverty. All societies have capacity for growth, but the poor society has nothing with which to buy growth. Having less than enough for its current needs for food, clothing, and shelter, it has nothing for investment in education, improved agriculture, transportation, public utilities, or industrial enterprise.
Each of these views leads naturally to a prescription. If institutions hold a country to its past, the answer is the destruction of those institutions. If the problem is the self-perpetuating character of privation, the answer is to provide the catalyzing resources — specifically, economic aid and assistance in its use — which the country cannot supply to itself.
Here is the first difference: the Marxian emphasis on institutions which inhibit progress and the need to eliminate them; our emphasis on the selfperpetuating character of poverty and the catalyzing role of aid. Each system, we should note, has a cause and remedy that are not without convenience to itself. The Soviets have always been short of capital, but they have had a revolution which could be exported at moderate expense. Accordingly, they found it convenient to associate backwardness with colonialism, feudalism, and repressive capitalism, all of which could be eliminated by revolution. By contrast, capital for us has been comparatively abundant. We could export it with greater ease and less likelihood of domestic repercussion than social revolution.
The second difference between the systems is in the way development is organized. Although there is room for some national preference, and heresy cannot be entirely eliminated, the Marxian commitment is to state ownership of the means of production — of land, capital plant, and natural resources. Private ownership of productive resources and their use for private gain are, in fact, considered one of the retarding institutions. The elimination of private ownership leaves the state in possession. Pecuniary incentives to individual and group effort are much favored. But incentives which use the device of property ownership to combine reward for individual effort with reward for the efficient management of property are excluded in principle, and in large measure, in practice.
The non-Marxian design for organizing development is not so easily typed. In the past, many countries—Japan, Germany, Canada, and to a remarkable degree, also, the United States — have made state ownership of canals, turnpikes, railroads, electric power and other utilities, and even steel mills the fulcrum of development policy. India, Egypt, and some South American countries are taking the same course today. However, the main and, indeed, overwhelming reliance in nonMarxian development, both in agriculture and industry, has been on private ownership of productive plant. This is true of countries, such as India, which vastly prefer to describe themselves as socialist.
The choice is between a comparatively firm commitment to public ownership of productive plant and resources and a blurred commitment to some combination of public and private ownership in which practical considerations as well as ideology determine the precise result. This is not a sharp distinction, but clearly it is one which has meaning.
WE ARE now in a position to see the consequences of the foregoing distinctions. And by now there is a good deal of experience on which to draw. Two major advantages lie with the Western or non-Marxian alternative. There is, according to ancient physical law, a certain difficulty in extracting blood from a stone. This is in all respects comparable with the problem of getting savings out of a poor society. When people do not have enough to eat, they are loath to forgo any part of their meal that they may eat better in the future. Pleas on behalf of a better life for children and grandchildren leave the man of simple, uncomplicated intelligence unmoved; he reflects that starvation will prevent his having children and, pro tanto, grandchildren as well. But Marxian no less than non-Marxian societies must have savings; without them there can be no growth. Accordingly, the Western pattern of development, with its prospect of assistance from outside the country, eases one of the most painful problems. This is why economic aid has become such an important feature of Western foreign policy. It is the process by which savings are transferred from countries where saving is comparatively unpainful to those where it is very painful. It exploits one of the major advantages of our system.
To be sure, the Communist countries are not without resources in this respect. The Soviet Union, though its capacity has been far less than ours, has spared some savings for other countries. Communist economic and political organization deals more effectively — or ruthlessly — with unproductive and excessively luxurious consumption. Such consumption by a small minority is, as I have noted, a common feature of the poor country. And Communist organization can, within limits, squeeze blood from its turnip.
The penalty is the pain, and this cannot be avoided. The rioting in Poland in 1956 which brought Gomulka to power was occasioned in large measure by the enforcement of a rate of saving that was too stern for the people to bear. These last years on the Chinese mainland have evidently been ones of serious trouble and tension. Part of the problem is inherent in socialist organization of agriculture. But some has certainly been inherent in the effort to extract a large volume of savings out of a very poor population.
The larger consequence is that Marxian development risks the alienation of the people as nonMarxian development does not. One doubts that a majority of the Chinese people are pleased with their government and would vote for it in an uninhibited poll. By contrast, India, after a decade of development, has recently given an overwhelming vote to the government that led the task. If the Indian government had had to subtract the $7.3 billion it has received in loans and grants from Western sources since independence from the meager incomes — an average of about $70 per year — of its own people, its popularity would certainly have suffered. We see in India, in remarkably clear relief, the advantages of the Western design in providing capital.
The second and equally substantial advantage of Western development is in the matter of agriculture. Industry, on the record, at least, is fairly tolerant as to forms of economic and political organization. American industry works moderately well under private ownership. The most reluctant free-enterpriser must agree that the Soviets have made considerable industrial progress under socialism. So no decisive contrast can be registered here. But the undeveloped country is, by definition, a pastoral or agrarian country. Its agricultural policy is, accordingly, vital. And it is still far from clear, as a practical matter, whether it is possible to socialize a small-scale, densely populated peasant agriculture.
In the Soviet Union, after nearly half a century, the agricultural problem has not been wholly solved. And in this area of economic activity, at least, there is no serious talk of catching up. Each year in agriculture we insouciantly extend our advantage in man-hour productivity without effort and somewhat to our regret. Outside the Soviet Union, agriculture has been even more of a problem. Poland and Yugoslavia have had to revert to private ownership. In China, by all external evidence, the effort to socialize agriculture has brought a drastic crisis and has certainly forced it to turn to the West for some of the largest food imports in history.
There are good reasons for this failure. Farmers, when they are small and numerous, can, if they choose, defeat any system that is available for their control. The employees of a factory, like the men of an army, are subject to external discipline. Failure in performance can be detected, judged, and penalized. The same rule holds for certain types of plantation agriculture. A scattered peasantry, carrying on the diverse tasks of crop and especially of livestock husbandry, cannot be so regimented. Certainly it cannot be so regimented if it disapproves of the system. And farmers have rarely, if ever, approved of any economic system which denied them ownership of land. Working for others or for the state, the farmer works at the minimum rather than the maximum, and the difference between the two is enormous. He can be made to work at his maximum by giving him land and rewarding him with the fruits of his labor or some substantial share to consume or exchange as he wishes. But this is to restore individual proprietorship — private capitalism — which doctrine excludes.
One day the Marxian economies may succeed in socializing agriculture. Certainly no effort is being spared. And the ability of the small man in agriculture to sabotage a system he dislikes or which treats him badly is not confined to Communism. It is the reason for the low productivity and backwardness of the latifundia of Latin America and the feudal domains of the Middle East. But the fact that independent agricultural proprietorship is accepted is the second clear advantage of Western development.
I COME now to the principal disadvantage of Western development. The Marxian alternative, I have noted, emphasizes the destruction of the bonds that tie the economy to the past. Our emphasis is on capital, education, technical assistance, and the other instruments that allow of change. Until recently, at least, we have been tempted to suppose that any society is a platform on which, given these missing elements, development can be built.
In fact, institutions do chain economies to the past, and the breaking of these chains is essential for progress. The promise of such drastic reform is a valid and appealing part of the Marxian case. There is no chance of agricultural development in the underdeveloped (and hence agricultural) country under systems of absentee landlordism where the workers or sharecroppers are confined by law and tradition to a minor share of a meager product. These feudal agricultural systems, moreover, extend their corrupting influence to government, to the provision of public or military sinecures to those who lack a claim on the land, to the milking of industrial enterprise, and to the destruction of the morale of the society itself. “In our country,” a South American guide once told me, “those who do the least get the most. I hear that in the United States it is the other way around. I believe yours is a better system.” Progress does require the radical elimination of retarding institutions. If elimination can be had from no other source, the Marxian alternative will sooner or later be tried. The revolution that is offered here, we should remind ourselves, is less the Russian Revolution than the French Revolution.
The final point of comparison unfortunately has been much damaged by bad rhetoric. From the earliest days of their development, personal liberty, equal justice under law, and constitutional government have been important to Englishmen and to Americans. These things have not been the concern of everyone, but we have never supposed them to be a foible of an esoteric and privileged minority.
And so it is in the undeveloped country today. The Andean tenant and the landless worker in an Orissa village do have a preoccupying concern with keeping themselves fed. But a widespread yearning for the dignity of democratic and constitutional government is a fact. No people who live under a dictatorship ever feel themselves to be first-class citizens.
Most people also believe that liberty and constitutional process are safer with the Western than with the Marxian alternative. We have not been nearly as consistent in our support of these as wisdom would have required. But the Communists are under the greater handicap that their alternative involves a major step into the dark. Whatever it offers, people know that it does not provide free election of rulers, habeas corpus, equal justice under law, and a voluntary return to other economic and social arrangements should the experiment prove unpalatable.
On first assessment, then, the advantages of the non-Marxian alternative for the developing country are considerable. It promises at least a partial avoidance of the pain that for the poor country is inherent in finding savings for investment and growth. It promises an acceptable and viable system of agriculture rather than a certain unpalatable and possibly unworkable one. And it offers personal liberty and constitutional process. Against this the Marxian alternative promises a rigorous and effective attack on the institutions — the unproductive claims on revenue, and especially the feudal control of land — which exclude change.
But this is not a game where one can count the cards and decide the winner. Some cards count for more than others, and there is the unfortunate possibility, in our case, that some valuable cards will not get played.
The Marxian promise can be decisive. That is because the things we offer are effective and attractive only after the retarding institutions are eliminated. In a country where land and other resources are held by and operated for the benefit of a slight minority, and where the apparatus of government serves principally to reinforce such privilege, aid is not of much use. It will too visibly benefit not the many but the few. Our promise of independent proprietorship is obviously nullified so long as land remains in the hands of the few, And personal liberty and constitutional government have little meaning in countries where government is of the privileged for the rich and corrupt as well.
We have no alternative, in short, but to meet the Marxian promise to be rid of archaic and retarding institutions. I doubt that we can organize revolution. But we can place our influence solidly on the side of reform and movements toward reform. If we do so, and it works, our cards give us a clear advantage. To be sure, we must play them. We must make good on our promise of a less painful savings and investment process. We must give firm support to the small farmer. We must be clear in our commitment to constitutional process and personal liberty. We cannot suppose that these are wanted only by people of AngloSaxon origin of good income. We must not excuse dictatorship on grounds of anti-Communism or convenience or the absence of visible alternatives. This is one of the oldest habits, and is certainly the most myopic, of our foreign policy. Its price, as we have now painfully learned, is disaster magnified by postponement.
These are highly practical matters. The first resort to the Marxian alternative in this hemisphere was in a country where the concentration of wealth and land ownership was extreme, where these had extended a corrupting influence to economic life and to government, and where dictatorship had been endemic. This being the experience of Cubans with the Western model, it was not remarkable that so many were so little perturbed by the alternative. India, in face of formidable difficulties, is strongly committed to development on the Western model. That is because even in British India, and over the whole country at the time of independence, there was a strong attack on retarding institutions — on the feudal claims of princes, zamindars, and great landlords, and on government, which was an extension of this landed power. Then a substantial measure of peasant ownership replaced the old system; aid from outside eased the problem of supply capital; and people felt secure in the protection of constitutional guarantees and representative government.
Given the same advantages, we may reasonably assume that people elsewhere will opt for them.