To a certain small extent this may be due to a rebellion of ordinary common-sense people against the absurdity of committees doing one-man jobs. In America the disposition to give great powers to mayors and prominent public servants--a disposition which Mr. Belloc calls, absurdly enough, a disposition to “monarchy,” and makes out to be a fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans--is probably due mainly to the perception of the need for a single head and a free hand in many complicated jobs. But the job is defined, and the term of power is defined. That concentration of _ad hoc_ powers in a single competent responsible person is of course a legitimate and most hopeful development of democratic method. It is no more “monarchy” than the power of a judge is monarchy. But the drift in Europe, in Germany, and the Latin countries generally is to a general and not to a specific free hand. The man is there not to do this or that specified thing but to take the whole power of the State out of the hands of the politicians. Russia is a special case; the dictator there is the ghost of Karl Marx acting through the Communist Party. But Russia is as far from parliamentary democracy as any country in the world. Parliamentary democracy did for a brief interval appear in Russia, but it was as suitable wear for that country at its present phase of education as a silk hat for a whale. Why have all these dictatorships sprung up? Why has there been this decline of faith throughout the world in the Anglo-Saxon device of parliamentary government? Every intelligent person must know that this is a world of men and not supermen, and every lapse to a dictatorship implies a belief in a superman. Every year of a dictatorship diminishes the autonomous vitality of a community, no dictatorship is proof against the degeneration of the dictator through impunity and presumption, and no dictator has ever provided an efficient successor. Yet we find the peoples of important European countries acquiescing in Mussolinis, Riveras, and the like, and powerful minorities in almost every European State asking for similar dictatorships. It is not that they are blind to the defects of dictatorships, but that they dislike parliamentary government more. A dictator may carry on a Government roughly and dangerously, but in many cases Parliaments have failed to carry on government at all.