ABSTRACT
We are in the midst of a period of revolutionary change to be as profound as any in the modern history of the human race. Historically, political democracy, throughout Western civilization, is the price the middle class had to pay for the support of the masses in its struggle with the feudal aristocracy for power. The history of political democracy in the period since the French Revolution is the history of its acceptance so long as the masses do not seek to extend it to the planes of economic and social life. The so-called policy of non-intervention in Spain inevitably destroyed a nascent democracy whose friendliness would have been vital to British strategic interests in the Mediterranean. British statesmen were confronted with novelties they shrank from handling either with assurance or courage. The outcome of the British government's inability to make up its mind about its policy was the conclusion of a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
