The Public Philosophy > Chapter I. The Obscure Revolution > 1917: The Revolutionary Year
In December, 1941 I put the manuscript away, knowing that so much was going to happen to the world and to me that if ever I went back to the book, it would be to start all over again. When I did come back to it after the war, the foreboding which had inspired it was in a terrible measure realized.
Something had gone very wrong in the liberal democracies. They had, to be sure, defeated their enemies. They had avoided defeat and subjection. But they were unable to make peace and to restore order. For the second time in a generation they had failed to prevent a ruinous war, they had been unwilling to prepare themselves to wage the war, and when at long last and at exorbitant cost they had managed to defeat their enemies, they had been unable to make peace out of their victories. They were entangled in a vicious circle of wars that led to ever bigger and wider wars. Could it be denied that they were sick with some kind of incapacity to cope with reality, to govern their affairs, to defend their vital interests and, it might be, to insure their survival as free and democratic states?
There was no mistaking the decline of the West. Thirty years after Wilson had proclaimed a world at peace under democratic governments, the North Atlantic democracies were preoccupied with the defense of western Europe and the fringes of the Eurasian continent. In less than half a century it had come to that. In 1900 men everywhere on earth had acknowledged, even when they resented, the primacy of the Western nations. They were the recognized leaders in the progress of mankind, and it was taken as axiomatic that the question was when, and not whether, the less advanced people would have learned how to use the Western technology, to hold free elections, to respect the Bill of Rights and to live by its political philosophy. Until 1917 the model for a new government anywhere in the world, even in Russia, was liberal democracy in the British, the French, or the American style.
But by the end of 1920 things had taken a sharp turn. Lord Bryce was then finishing his Modern Democracies, and though he still wrote in the prewar manner that democracy was spreading and that the number of democracies in the world had doubled within fifteen years, he had seen the warning signs and he was troubled. It might not be 'really helpful to the younger generation,' he wrote in the preface, but he could not 'repress the pessimism of experience.' He had to say that 'although democracy has spread, and although no country that has tried it shows any signs of forsaking it, we are not yet entitled to hold with the men of 1789 that it is the natural and, therefore, in the long run, the inevitable form of government. Much has happened since the rising sun of liberty dazzled the eyes of the States-General at Versailles. Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government. If it be improbable, yet it is not unthinkable that, as in many countries impatience with tangible evils substituted democracy for monarchy or oligarchy, a like impatience might someday reverse the process.'
Three years later Mussolini marched on Rome, and Italy became the first of the bigger democracies 'to reverse the process.' In retrospect we can now see that what Lord Bryce, writing at the end of the First World War, thought was the pessimism of experience was in fact the intuition of a sensitive and knowing observer. He had felt in his bones, being too close to the event to perceive it, that a fundamental change in the prospects of democracy was in the making.
There had occurred, I now believe, an unrecognized revolution within the democratic states. By the third year of the First World War the cumulative losses had become so exorbitant that the institutional order of all the belligerents gave way under the stress and strain. The war had become, in Ferrero's telling phrase, hyperbolic, and the prewar governments were incapable of imposing such unlimited drafts upon the endurance and the loyalties of the people. In the defeated countries the price of this was revolution against the established order. The Romanoff, the Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg and the Ottoman Empires collapsed. In the victorious countries institutions were not overthrown, rulers were not exiled, imprisoned or executed. But the constitutional order was altered subtly and yet radically, within itself.