Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1936. THE DAWN OF DICTATORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 70, 19 September 1936, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1936. THE DAWN OF DICTATORS

Of the various forms of government that exist today it might be supposed, from the agitation they have caused elsewhere, that the dictatorships which exist in Russia, Germany, and Italy and threaten to spread over a wider area in Europe are an entirely new phenomenon' in history and all the more disquieting on account of: their novelty. In some important aspects they are new, but in the main they are almost as old as history itself. On what ancient prototype Herr Hitler models himself nobody knows, probably not even the Fuhrer himself, for he is not credited with being a student of history, at any rate* of the world outside Germany prior to the War; but of II Duce of Italy it is certain that he draws much of his inspiration from the great Julius Caesar himself, the founder of the Roman Empire, whose bust stands before the dictator of Modern Italy as a perpetual reminder of the classic glories of Old Rome. If Signor Mussolini lives long enough to add a few years to the scriptural span—and his regime survives—he may be able to celebrate the biinillenary of Caesar's death in 44 B.C. and give a new significance to the Ides of March, It is two thousand years ago since Julius Caesar began a career which ended in the subversion of the Roman State, dictatorship, and death by assassination. The substitution of personal for constitutional rule began much earlier, almost, indeed, at the dawn of history proper in the Greek and Roman world. At that time—roughly, from about the seventh century B.C. on—we find that the city-states of Greece had established colonies all over the Mediterranean coast, not" colonies as we know them; but independent cities, which, as a rule, were bound to their metropolis, or mother-city, only by ties of common culture. Their form of government was described by the Greeks as aristocracy —the word democracy had then not even been coined—that is, government by the /best people. This had apparently worked well in the primitive past, but through what must have been a boom period in colonisation and trade, aided probably by the, invention of coinage, the rule of the best had become generally the rule of . the few and rich, an oligarchy, as the. Greeks called if. Aristotle, in his treatise on the Athenian Constitution, says of Athens at this period: ,-

Not only was the Constitution oligarchical in every respect, but the poorer classes, men, women, and children, were in'absolute slavery to the rich. . . . The whple country

was in the hands of a few persons, and. if the tenants failed to pay thenrent, they were liable to be haled into slavery, and their children with them. Their persons were mortgaged to their creditors. . . . but the hardest and

bitterest part of the condition of the masses was the fact that they had no share in the offices then existing under the Constitution. . . . To speak

generally, they had no part or share in anything. ........ Naturally, such conditions, which seem to have prevailed in most of the Greek city-states at. the time, were a hotbed for revolution. The Athenians, who even then displayed the elements of political wisdom which made Athens in its golden age, a century later, one of. the most genuine democracies of all time, for-, tunately evaded revolution by appointing an arbiter—a' Royal Commissioner, as we might say—to, put their affairs in order. This man happened to be the renowned Solon, whose work in the rehabilitation of the Athenian State has made his name immortal. His methods were even more drastic than those adopted to meet the depression in our own country. All outstanding debts incurred on trre security of land or person were absolutely cancelled, and with that, says the historian of the city-state, "the marks of hopeless mortgaging disappeared from the land." In spite of these and, many other social, economic, and political reforms Athens within fifty years had its selfappointed dictator. Pisistratus, who, however, was of the, mild variety of despot,' and actually paved the way to Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C. Elsewhere among the city-states, particularly in the two extremes of the' Greek world, the East and the West, these unconstitutional rulers kept cropping up from time to time throughout the next two centuries, now as a prelude to democracy, and again as an interlude in oligarchy. This absolutism was particularly abhorrent to the Greeks, who called its exponents "tyrants," not exactly in our sense of the word, but as representing the popular opinion of men who gained power illegitimately outside the regular constitutional channels and without the official consent of the governed. Not all the "tyrants" were evil. Many attained power by championing popular causes against oppression; others, as in Sicily, took up the national cause, as Mussolini and Hitler conceive their mission today, against external enemies. It was the "tyrants" of Syracuse who maintained Greek civilisation in Sicily for

two centuries against the attack of the Carthaginians until the Romans were able to take up the task. The Courts of the "tyrants" were noted for the protection they gave to the poets, philosophers, and artists of the heyday of Greek culture. But the idea of "tyranny" was hateful to the Greeks; they wanted no personal rule when they could rule themselves and be free citizens of their city-states, however small they were. With the Romans reverence for the traditional forms of the Constitution and faith in law and order were far stronger, and it Was these qualities which finally gave Rome the empire of the world, a control which the Greeks by themselves could never have gained, but which for a brief period, under Alexander the Great, of Macedon, seemed a possibility. It was the Romans who invented the I role of the dictator. They made it a part of their Constitution to be able to call in a man of note to take charge of affairs in a time of emergency. Such, was Quintus Fabius Maximus, who in the darkest days of the Second Punic War, when Hannibal was at the gates of Rome, "cunctando restituit rem," "restored the State by his policy of caution." The dictator passed with the emergency which called him into being and retired into private life to emerge, perhaps, no more. In Caesar's day Rome had changed and it was impossible to "restore the State" by ordinary means. The emergency refused to. pass, and Caesar remained dictator and lived long enough to lay the foundations of the Roman Empire and its centuries of Caesars, as often as not, themselves no more than dictators who grasped power violently. The modern dictatorships have sprung from past crises in the countries where, they exist. Spain today reveals the "stasis" or partystrife which proved the cause of the ultimate downfall of Greece, as well as of the Roman Republic. What the outcome of it all will be it is impossible to say, but jt is well to remember that the ancient world did survive its "tyrannies," which were often but the. forerunners of a popular government which proved far more enduring. The evidence is that democracy in the long run can outlast dictatorship.