DEMOCRACY'S STRENGTH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23731, 11 February 1939, Page 2

DEMOCRACY'S STRENGTH

A free community, with freedom to express opinion through its newspapers, on public platforms and in Parliament through elected representatives, can change its rulers and its laws without disaster when it feels that public welfare demands a change, writes Mr Wickham Steed in a recent book. In totalitarian countries change cannot be wrought without upheaval or violence. For a time, and under stress of emergency, a dictatorship may be more efficient than a democracy. It does not follow that democracies, instructed in public affairs by their public men and by a vigilant, outspoken press, need always be less efficient than dictatorships. And it remains broadly true that the margin of inefficiency in democracies, the time-lag between their recognition of what should be done and the doing of it, is in the nature of an insurance premium against disaster when change is needed. Even in matters of life and death, such as war. it has yet to be proved that free democracies are inferior as political systems to communities which obey commands from above. It was not the democracies that were worsted in the Great War, however egregiously lack of insight and leadership among them may have brought them to the verge of losing the peace and may have imperilled their very existence.