ABSTRACT
Bristling with dictatorships, the world is to-day a strange place indeed for those of us who were born and bred under the banners of democracy flapping in the winds of liberty. The citizens of free countries felt then sure to be in the van of evolution, showing the way to those less fortunate men who still lingered under the yoke of Japanese Mikado, Turkish Sultan, Russian Tsar, or even German Emperor or Spanish King. A comparatively slight deviation (by present-day standards) from the canons of justice and respect for the individual struck to the quick the liberal conscience of the whole civilized world. Storms were raised not only by the Russian pogroms but by cases in which the victim was a single individual and the issue, legally at any rate, debatable and complicated, such as the Dreyfus and Ferrer cases, or in recent, incredibly recent, years the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. It was assumed, nay it was known—in fact, nothing else was believed or believable—that the men who lived under standards of liberty below those of France, England, or America suffered from such a privation of one of man’s primary necessities, and that a permanent effort was being made by them to secure the full stature of mankind which a free citizenship implies. Of all the anticipations which the men of those days could allow their imagination to make as to the future, the wildest by far never adumbrated that the Russian revolution would lead to a dictatorship as strict as, and more vigorous than, that of Tsardom; that the country of Garibaldi and Benedetto Croce would live gladly and even proudly under the rule of a twentieth-century Caesar, and that the land of Kant and Goethe would vote herself enthusiastically out of democracy within a few years of having voted herself into it.
