The dictators are right . . .

The dictators are right when they blame the democracies for the world's condition, but they are wrong when they blame it on democracy. The anarchy comes from the refusal of the democracies to renounce enough of their national sovereignty to let effective world law and order be set up. But their refusal to do this, their maintenance of the state for its own sake, their readiness to sacrifice the lives and liberties of the citizens rather than the independence of the state---this we know is not democracy. It is the core of absolutism. Democracy has been waning and autocracy waxing, the rights of men lessening and the rights of the state growing everywhere because the leading democracies have themselves led in practicing beyond their frontiers autocracy instead of democracy.

Clarence K. Streit
Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 27.