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tain jobs and prices; it used monetary policy systematically, as a weapon in economic planning. And throughout Scandinavia, social insurance schemes inherited from earlier years were extended and rationalized during the Great Depression to cover the hazards of sickness, invalidism, and old age for the entire population.

To observers from Britain, France, or the United States—oppressed by the fumbling of their own governments, by mounting class tension at home, and by the steady advance of fascism and communism abroad—Scandinavia in the early 1930s seemed to offer a haven of competence and good sense. Here governments ensured full employment and protected their people against want; capital and labor composed their differences across a conference table instead of fighting it out in bitter strikes; the economic and psychological barriers between classes were losing their rigidity as the welfare state imposed ruinous taxes on the rich and guaranteed a livelihood to the poor. Even the physical aspect of these countries seemed better. The cities were clean and trim and amply provided with parks and public housing. Indeed, the housing exhibition held at Stockholm in 1930 epitomized the whole trend; building after building reflected the influence of the new “International Style,” which, like so many other twentieth-century innovations, had been accepted by the Scandinavians in common-sense fashion as the type of construction best suited to the requirements of contemporary life.

No wonder, then, that these observers hailed the Scandinavian course as the “middle way"—the way of pragmatic flexibility, steering between doctrinaire socialism on the one side and doctrinaire free enterprise on the other. It seemed to offer a new and heartening possibility for saving democratic government throughout the Western world. And such a fresh look at democracy was urgently needed. Nearly everywhere else in Europe, authoritarian government was confidently advancing, and democratic parliamentarism revealing its pitiable inadequacy.

V. THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

By the mid-1930s, the Great Depression was beginning to lift. In all the major countries except France, the national economy had turned the corner: Production was mounting; unemployment was falling. But depression lifted only in the strictly economic sense. In political life and popular morale, the depression psychology persisted. The great democracies of Western Europe seemed sick—and none knew what remedy would cure them. In Italy and Germany, parliamentary democracy had disappeared. In Britain, it was functioning only lamely. In France, it seemed to be wallowing in political squalor. How long, people asked, could such a system maintain itself?

The parliaments of Europe had been caught unaware by problems of unprecedented scope and had failed to deal with them. Before 1914, it was possible for representative bodies to proceed in leisurely and amateurish fashion; the parliamentary practice of engulfing issues in floods of oratory had sufficed when the issues themselves were still of a political or ideological nature that demanded no special expert knowledge. But when the First World War, its liquidation, and the Great Depression raised their acutely complex economic and financial problems, the old political routines proved obsolete. Something else was needed to master a situation in which the role of government itself had increased

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