Читать книгу Economic Development in Denmark Before and During the World War онлайн

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Certain it is that the feeling which prevails to-day, the world over, is not one of security. The dread of further war is greater than it was before 1914. In some areas war still prevails, in others peace is held by a precarious tenure, and in all it can be firmly established only by conscious and intelligent action by the states themselves. Mere exhaustion holds war dogs temporarily in leash, but it will take more than that to tame them as they must be tamed if peace is made to last.

We here confront a wide difference between the several states in comparative desire for peace and disposition to maintain it. One portentous fact is the grim determination of Russian communists to extend their system by crude force from state to state. Bolshevism is government by the few and largely the bad masquerading as government for ​and by the people. In its mother country, Russia, the economic measure by which it began its career was confiscation of private wealth—in itself an ultra-democratic measure. If this had brought in a true communism, it would have been a ruthless and unjust measure for creating a peace-loving state. A just and orderly democratizing of industry in the several states would give new strength to the forces of peace, and it would be highly improbable that any state so influenced would try to extend its system over foreign countries by military invasion. Democracy, socialism, communism, and bolshevism all appear in the aftermath of the war. The first of them makes for future peace and so does even the conservative element in the second, while all else in the series means certainty of civil strife and danger of international war.