DEMOCRACY’S FOUNDATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1938, Page 7

DEMOCRACY’S FOUNDATION

BEGINNING WITH REFORMATION. Democracy in the modern world began with the Reformation and the Renaissance, writes the Marquess of Lothian in the “Christian Science Monitor.” The Renaissance restored to Europe the knowledge of the civilisation and democratic institutions of Athens and the Roman Republic. The Reformation substituted the right of individual judgment and conscience for the duty of obedience to authority, which had been the foundation both of Church and State throughout the mediaeval age and led to the Protestant churches and to the decision of political issues by majority vote. It took several centuries for the ideas thus reborn in the world to work out to their logical conclusion. But today, just, when the democratic ideas of personal liberty, individual rights and universal suffrage have been carried to their logical conclusion in both Britain and France, democracy as a system of government has disappeared over a large part of the world, and the system is not working too well either in France or England. There is, indeed, everywhere deep disquiet as to its future. The remedy, of course, is not a return to. totalitarianism. Those who have experienced democracy know that nothing can compensate for the loss of individual freedom and responsibility, and that while the authoritarian regimes may show surface results for a time they end by demoralising their subjects because they do not develop in them the capacity of thinking from the standpoint of conscience for themselves, so that fear of authority and spying rather than responsibility and individual initiative become increasingly the real basis of the authoritarian State. The remedy is that the democratic people should return to the real foundation of their faith, overcome their selfishness and make public service rather than private gain their aim—in a word, to return to that original democratic thesis that the freedom which democracy seeks to establish can exist only where the Spirit of the Lord also rules.