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Excerpt from The Fight for Democracy
The experiences of the war have thoroughly exposed the delusion that democracy in any of its essential features has been yet attained in Great Britain. Few of the elements of civil and personal liberty have stood secure, while political self-government by popular representation has been put on to the scrap-heap. The industrial liberties won for the organised workers by generations of sacrifice and struggle have been similarly cancelled. The patriotic sentiment of the people has been deliberately exploited by the enemies of democracy. Their fears and suspicions have been allayed by the pretence that the invasions of their liberties were only "for the duration of the war," and that they would get them back with interest afterwards. But those who realise that this war has been the opportunity which every cause of oligarchy and reaction has been waiting for, in order to fasten the fetters of political and economic serfdom more firmly on to the limbs of "the masses," will take a different view of the prospects of democracy after the war.
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