European Dictatorships

Extract

The American viewing present-day European governments is more than ordinarily perplexed. He knew that states, great and small, had adopted nineteenth-century constitutions in conscious imitation of free British parliamentary self-government. The four ancient governmental systems associated with the names Romanoff, Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Othman, which were based on autocracy, with or without a claim of divine sanction, with or without a record of efficient service—these he had seen the Great War bring down to cataclysmic ruin. Perhaps he had thought of that war as democracy's righteous, forceful defense of itself against the aggression of imperialism. He had seen, if not shared, high hopes of a reconstruction, wherein free states should cooperate in a league of peace, and rival each other only peacefully, in perfecting democratic constitutions and the mechanisms of individual liberty and social order.