DEMOCRACY NOT DONE FOR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 262, 5 November 1930, Page 6

DEMOCRACY NOT DONE FOR.

Can we believe it at a moment when the news records the triumph of the reactionary ir Germany and the execution of Yugoslav sympathisers within the.bounds of the Duce's writ , oi law (writes "E.L.C.W." from London) ? Here if Count Sforza, Italian diplomat, who in a long career hae seen affairs and the persona'ges ibehinc them in a dozen major countries ranging from China to Stamboul, even after a long recital oi these wide-ranging experiences, yet concludes thai democracy is sound, and that these alarms and dictatorships are but democracy's' growing pains and that- we—that is, the mucr more of a -whole than we are yet able to realise.' Such is the conclusion of his book "Makers ol Modern Europe" (Elkih M&thews and Marrott) This conclusion deserves quotation. "If the foui years of ■ "war which covered Europe with blood give ue any right to draw a few conclusions froir the tragedies we witnessed we cannot but mari this —that the war was won by the peoples imbued with democratic traditions, and that the only autocratic state belonging to the democratic coalition, Russia, was the one to fall to pieces.* "The principle of democracy had become sc evident and so generally admitted that, perhaps too many consequences were drawn from it. As a result, there were bound to be some fallacies some excessive generalisations. I am convinced that democracy will prove true even in the' field where "it now seems most trampled on— l mear in Russia. Who would dare to deny that oui of the movement of the Russian peasants a new democracy, a peaceful one, may blossom one daj and give, at last to old Czaristic Russia, and tc new Bolshevik Russia, the human dignity thej never had? The very exaggerations of the present hatreds are really the birth-pangs of a safei and more comprehensive democracy; all the rage against it is merely the last jeffort of a defeated army. Murders, exiles, sorrows, humiliations, will not have been in vain if they have taught that the fruits of liberty can only be preserved through liberty/and that their preservation is in reality, a constantly-reviving creation. "These problems and preoccupations are not only European. America cannot be immune from theni, if only after the war, she was noi immune from that fever common to all belligerent States —f ear of Bolshevism. Bolshevism and Faar-of-BolshevisnThave been, are still, the twe diseases of the Western World, of that world where the ocean, bound to become smaller and smaller, is slowly, assuming the part of common lake, which was played for centuries in Europe (by the Mediterranean Sea."