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peoples of the world.
With our 217 years of experience, it is often difficult to recognize how new, how unheard of, and how unrealistic Democracy was to the peoples of this earth. In 1776 everybody knew that a nation needed a Strong ruler, or an aristocracy to gbvem it, that the common man was absolutely incapable of governing himself.
When we look today at the struggles of Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union to establish democracy without any tradition of democracy, we begin to understand how difficult it was for those Americans in 1776 to establish a new Way of governing a country. We could have easily bungled the job. The French did a few years later: their democracy giving way to terttir, to military rule and then to an emperor.
Today in 1993, we have seen military coups displace or threaten to displace democracy in this continent, in Africa, in Asia and in the former Soviet Union. Democracy, when it eegins, is a fragile thing and not assured of success, yet we succeeded.
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