A PESSIMISTIC OUTLOOK

 "Democracy in Crisis," by Harold J. Laski London: Allen and Unwin Ltd) 11/3

The critical position of democratic government is Professor Laski's theme. In the United States, he points out, banking, power, oil, transport, coal—all the essential services upon which the public welfare depends,—are vested interests in private hands; in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Jugoslavia the pretence of Parliamentary democracy has been abandoned; in Japan a military oligarchy is in charge; Spain has revived a Parliamentary regime, "but who can call it stable?" The South American republics continue their unenviable record of casual revolution; China is the prey of bandits; and Turkey and Persia have changed from dictatorships on the Eastern to dictatorships on the Western model. Only the British Dominions, Holland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries remain, with Switzerland, at all firmly wedded to a Parliamentary system; but the economic position of Australia makes the persistence of parliamentarainism a matter upon which doubt is permissible. In explanation of his contention about Australia, Professor Laski says :—" A country mortgaged to absentee creditors cannot easily maintain a high standard of life for the masses and continue to pay the interest on its debt abroad. If it defaults upon the debt its international position becomes dubious; if it meets its obligations a high standard of life becomes inaccessible to all save a small wealthy class. Is it likely that universal suffrage will produce the conditions upon which the security of capitalism depends?" For all the evils that are afflicting the world Professor Laski blames Capitalist democracy and the disturbing effect of the war. Certainty has been replaced by pessimism. The Western way of life is in the melting pot. The ancient East, so long content with a passive aquiescence in the ascendancy of the West, has issued a challenge to those who seek to preserve the conditions of tutelage. Professor Laski makes this ominous addition to this gloomy summary :— 

"The search by the intelligentsia for new canons of behaviour is like nothing so much as the last period of the ancient French regime." Obsessed by his own conception of what is happening, Professor Laski looks for the remedies. The first that he finds is the realisation that the central fact of the age is economic international independence. We should, he advises, try to discover the formulæ of an international society. The sovereign national state should be abrogated and there should be international control of currency, tariffs, migration, foreign investment and conditions of labour. "We are dominated," he declares "by a communal psychology, which thinks essentially in terms of the national state; can we rapidly transfer our thinking to the new plane that an international society implies?" Speaking of Great Britain in particular, he discusses the wisdom of transferring "a capitalist into an egalitarian democracy," and he predicts that the attempt will be made when the Labour party obtains an electoral majority in Parliament with consequences that he himself does not contemplate with equanimity.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 8 July 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4747508