If we travel today to the West, we renew our lives after they have withered, strengthen our senses after their edge has been blunted, and enter a phase in which we learn, consider, and get used to customs, most of which are good. It is worthy of us to adopt them from those who preceded us by stages and miles, because they are the result of inherited knowledge and successive far-sightedness. Everything we see in the lands of the West is the work of past centuries and generations who learned and worked... Western civilization is strange in every aspect of its manifestations, because its people have made good use of every power in existence, while we, through our ignorance, have wasted the powers that are easily benefited from. This is their business in everything. It is as if the West swore not to ally with the East, and the East swore not to differ from the West, despite its great need for it and its compulsion to take from it.