Professor Ridgeway in an address recently delivered to the Classical
Association entered a caveat against the opinion that a universal reign of democracy in a somewhat extreme form must necessarily connote the inauguration of a universal reign of peace. Lord Cromer supports this view in a timely and cogent letter in Monday's Times. "All the lessons of history go to show that the rule of Demos is no surer guarantee against war than that of oligarchs or despots. . . . As it was in the days of Pericles and Cleon, so it was in those of Robespierre, Denton, and their immediate successors." It was a complete fallacy, Lord Cromer continues, to hold Napoleon solely responsible for the policy of unbridled ambition and territorial extension with which his name is generally associated. The Republican Government adopted the same highly aggressive policy which had found favour with its predecessors, the Bourbon Kings, and one of the results of the reign of ultra-democracy during the French Revolution was to stimulate rather than mitigate human passions, and to foster the desire for territorial aggrandise- ment,
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