ABSTRACT
Carry yourself back to those years after the Armistice. You were in Germany soon after the conclusion of peace. You remember our anxieties. There were the acute ones – the peace treaty, some of the terms of which were hardly endurable; Reparations; the intrinsic weakness of our political life; then, later, unemployment, the agrarian crisis, and those internecine conflicts of parties with no political tradition and not even an established routine. There was the decay of the state as the guardian of public order, its capitulation to the mob, and, on the other side, the continual extension of the sphere of the state into new regions.
