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Updated: May 21, 2025
Before the war, during the war, and throughout the earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail.
The democrats of Russia knew, moreover, that, in addition to the natural affinity which served to bind the two autocracies, the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynasties had been closely knit together in a strong union by years and years of carefully planned and strongly wrought blood ties.
The wrong torn from confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere in the sham republics, and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game. The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy again, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, and the generations to come will be marked for the sword.
In fact the only comfort which we can suggest to those who regret the decline of an august institution, is that decadent autocracies have often shown an astonishing toughness. But as head of the universal Church, in any true sense of the word, Rome has finished her life.
We were in the habit of describing the two great governments, that of the German Empire and that of the Russian Empire, with the word "autocracies." And in that each was, and one still is, controlled absolutely by a small group of men, responsible to nobody but themselves, this was true. Aside from that, no further comparison is possible.
It was generally believed by Russian Socialists that in 1905 the Kaiser had promised to send troops into Russia to crush the Revolution if called upon for that aid. Many German Socialists, it may be added, shared that belief. Autocracies have a natural tendency to combine forces against revolutionary movements.
In the establishment of a world organization universality of international representation in reaching an agreement seemed to me advisable, if not essential, provided the nations represented were democracies and not autocracies.
The striking contrast between the United States of North America and the disunited States of South America in this respect is, from the Pacifist point of view, very much in favor of the northern unity. The only objection to large political units is that they make extremely dangerous autocracies. But as groups of federated democracies they are the best neighbours in the world.
Germany's drink bill even ten years ago was $560,000,000 for beer, $140,000,000 for spirits, and $125,000,000 for wine. There is a wine, beer, or spirit dealer in Berlin for every 157 of the inhabitants, men, women, and children. It has always been the avowed policy of autocracies to atone for the lack of political freedom by lax regulations in regard to moral matters.
Consent was given as to the others, but only after much talk and grudgingly as to Lafayette. His unconquerable hostility to the reigning autocracies was too well known, and Austria even attempted to impose the terms that, if freed, Lafayette should be deported to America under promise never again to put his foot either in Austria or Prussia.
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