The Great Reaction
Ten years after the beginning of the war there is no sense of security in Europe or the world. “The war to end war,” as it was called, has done nothing of the kind. Beneath the surface of the present peace there is a lava of hatreds and resentments which bode ill for the future peace of the world. There are larger standing armies in Europe now than in 1913. There are more causes of quarrel, and none of the old quarrels have been extinguished—those racial rivalries, those national ambitions, that commercial competition. The war settled no argument for more than a period of exhaustion. The idea of a “world safe for democracy” is falsified ten years after by a swing-back to extreme forms of nationalism and autocratic government through the greater part of Europe excepting the British Isles and France. The German Republic, established after annihilating defeat, is only biding its time for the return of monarchy, and its present government is anti-democratic. Parliamentary institutions, the safeguard of democracy, have been overthrown or contemptuously treated in many nations. Italy, Spain and Hungary are under military dictatorships. Russia is governed by a new-fangled tyranny under which there is no liberty of speech, conscience or economic life. Turkey, powerful again, is ruled by a committee of generals. Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, are in military alliance with France which, under Poincaré, ridiculed the possibilities of peace based on the goodwill of its neighbours, and relied for safety on a supreme army and the rule of Force.