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Updated: June 25, 2025
And as history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated their ideals. The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase.
Literature, strictly consider'd, has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally, the tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued, have been to make mostly critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there were some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life, and the rude rank spirit of the democracies.
It will not, therefore, suffice merely to crush the Junkers, and with them militarism and autocracy. Unless, as the fruit of this appalling bloodshed and suffering, the democracies achieve economic freedom, the war will have been fought in vain.
They inspire nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing to true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from his stall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and the company promoter from the director's chair, and elect them as representative men. We certainly do this in Ireland. It is how many hundred years since greatness guided us?
And set this down to the credit of the midget populace: few midgets, or maybe none at all, are ever convicted of the major crimes of murder, mayhem, arson, or theft. If the 'big ones' were as law-abiding as the 'little ones' there would be little need for criminal courts and jails. "It was the establishment of democracies that gave midgets a status as a citizen.
The intimate connection of representation with the progress which has followed its introduction is so little recognized that the most advanced democracies are now willing to listen to any proposal to return to direct government.
It is the glory of democracies that they may be misled but never driven. Here and there, like brave deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the sumptuous uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military caste. Also in evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay.
King after king had passed in splendid, glittering pomp across her plains, circled by a crowd of obsequious courtiers, trampling on a nameless multitude of slaves. Europe was to make democracies, or at least to try her hand at them. It has been well said that a democracy is the strongest government for defence, the weakest for attack.
We have shown how intimately related they are to the two great principles underlying representative government organization and leadership. Nay, we have seen that all the varied phenomena presented by the great democracies of the world can be expressed in terms of the same two principles.
So, when the War came, all the democracies felt a lively pang: the crushing of France meant the crushing of democracy and liberty. All the old bonds are broken, all the organization which Germany had abroad is smashed up, and France has been saved, not by arms alone, but by the potent life of free peoples.
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