The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s2.10

c12.s2.10

It is well to remember how the very idea of a republic stank in the nostrils of Europeans when the American republic was born. The general antipathy to the first French republic was as notorious as is today the sentiment against anti-propertyism and sovietic *svarâj*. The whole Napoleonic war was really a war of self-defence on the part of the trustees of republicanism against the enemies of popular government who were financed and directed by England. The Holy Alliance of 1815 also under the leadership of Russia was a union of monarchies, organized to put down démocratic upheavals and help the crowned heads. It was to withstand the effects of this "league of nations" that the Monroe Doctrine was launched in 1823 on behalf of the republics of the New World. In the history of the constitution, President Monroe's message belongs to the same category as the military challenge of revolutionary France to the ruling dynasties of Europe. Similarly the struggles of 1830 and 1848 had to be fought on every inch of European soil on the question of republicanism (at any rate, democracy or consitutionalism) vs. absolute monarchy. All these facts indicate the enormous opposition in the teeth of which the modern republic has had to grow up. They point also to the profoundly novel character of the theories and institutions associated with it.