CHAPTER X
DEMOCRACY AND HUMANITY
HOW we made our State anew, by what means and with what aims, I have now shown. Henceforth we must think how to preserve it. Once before we lost our independence—all the more reason for us to take our bearings carefully and conscientiously in the new European situation created by the Peace.
It is no part of my task to deal in detail with home and foreign policy. Rather have I to expound the main principles on which I believe our restored State should be conducted. Its very re-establishment shows that the worth of these principles has been proved in practice. The policy pursued for four years abroad-the policy that gained us independence—must be continued. Foreign policy though it was, its principles are applicable also to our home policy. These principles are tersely expressed in the title of this chapter. It remains to illustrate them more systematically; and if, in so doing, many a problem of political science will be touched upon, I shall avoid far-reaching theory since I am speaking as a practical man. It is not merely as a theory of my work abroad and of my share in the world war and the revolution it wrought, but as an organic sequel that I regard this concluding portion of my report.
The war was, indeed, a world war, not solely a Franco-German struggle for Alsace-Lorraine, or a conflict between Germans and Russians or Teutons and Slavs. Such issues were but parts of a great fight for freedom and democracy, a fight between theocratical absolutism and democratic humanity. For this reason the whole world, literally, joined in the war which, by its duration, became a world revolution. Between it and the Thirty Years’ War the analogy is obvious, both in point of length—the rapidity of modern communications and the technical perfection of the military machine compressed more than thirty years into the compass of four—and in point of character, substance and meaning. The Thirty Years’ War was fought for the re-ordering of Europe after a religious revolution. In the Four Years’ War it was a question of ordering Europe and the world anew after a political revolu-
