210 The Great Depression, 19291935

so vastly. In this respect, as in so many others, postwar Europe never returned to normal.
National leaders resorted to a variety of provisional expedients. None proved
satisfactory; each raised as many problems as it settled. Among these expedients was
government by coalition. A coalition of parties was, in itself, a proper and democratic way of
setting up a governmentthat is, when it was honestly managed. In a multiparty state, the
alternation in power of two great coalitions offered the only possible way of approximating a twoparty systemas in France in 1919 with the Bloc National and in 1924 with the Cartel des
Gauches. But this was true only if the coalitions stood for principlesif they were clearly of the
Right or of the Left and had some vestige of a common program. When this was not trueas in
Germany through most of the Weimar period coalition government became a travesty; it
distorted the verdict of the electorate without providing governmental stability in return.
A similar dishonesty characterized the national" ministries to which Britain resorted in
1916 and 1931, and France in 1926 and 1934. Under the guise of rising above parties and
expressing the unity of the nation, such governments proved themselves little more than a
device for returning to power the conservatives who had lost the previous election. It was not
surprising that the Left railed against these ministriesthat the French Radicals, who had been
tricked into such a combination in 1926, proved more wary in 1934, and that the British Labour
party, which had seen the Liberals sold out during the war by their leader Lloyd George, reacted
so violently to MacDonald's similar act of betrayal in 1931. Only by reviling him, expelling him
from the party, and developing new leaders was Labour able to escape the fate by which the
Liberal party had been overtaken.
If government by coalition might become mere fraud, the other favorite expedientrule
by decreewas even more doubtfully democratic. In the interwar years. Britain succeeded in
avoiding this latter practice entirely, but in Germany and France, its general employment
contributed heavily to discrediting democracy. When heads of government like Brning and
Doumergue insisted that the only way to cope with a recalcitrant parliament was to issue laws
by executive order, it was quite obvious that demo. cratic practices were breaking down. It was
equally apparent that the locus of political power was shifting. The authority that was slipping
from the hands of parliament was passing to the high civil servantsthose anonymous but
powerful persons who had always had more permanent positions and greater prestige in
Europe than in the United States. They alone possessed the technical competence to deal with
inflation and deflation, taxes and tariffs, monetary controls, and public works. The solutions they
favored were generally conservative and paternalistic; for career public servants customarily
came from the propertied classes. Indeed, in certain cases they carried into the postwar era the
rule of the old aristocracy. Graduates of special schools and with a strong sense of caste, these
technocrats scorned both public and parliament as mere ignoramuses; from this it was only a
step to scorn democracy itself.
Here, too, the democratic Left felt betrayed. Winning elections did it no good The
establishment of the propertied and the well born always returned to power. Had the result
been aristocratic rule in the true sensethat is, rule by the bestsuch defe might have been
less frustrating. But the expedients of the conservatives usually produced only government by
pretentious mediocrities. This was what the fascist leade