On the Rocks
by George Bernard Shaw
In "On the Rocks," P.M. didn't beat anyone. The proletarians attacked him and immediately gave up on him; and while the Conservatives fully endorsed the points of his program that contributed to their private affairs, they broke with him and followed the leaders of Hard Nuts as soon as he called them to his heel. As for the militant dictatorship, it means nothing but Gas and Regiment. At present, in all countries that do not remain in the mud, such as England, dictators dominate: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Kemal, Roosevelt, Pilsudski and De Valera. But none of these dictatorships is like any other. What they have in common is the elimination of the party government and the opposition. The idea that the only alternative to the party system is a king disguised as a republican dictatorship is, unfortunately, only a symptom of the political ignorance and thoughtlessness that is now an almost universal disease.
