Mein Kampf
I had always hated the Parliament, but not as an institution in itself. On the contrary, as a lover of freedom I could imagine no other possibility of government. In view of my attitude to the House of Hapsburg the thought of any sort of dictatorship would have seemed a crime against liberty and reason.
No small factor in this was the fact that my constant newspaper-reading had innoculated me as a young man, without my realizing it, with a certain admiration for the English Parliament—an admiration I could not get rid of in a moment. The dignity with which even the lower House over there fulfilled its duties (according to the beautiful reports in our newspapers) impressed me greatly. How could there possibly be any nobler form of self-government of a people?
For that very reason I was an enemy of the Austrian Parliament. The form in which the whole thing was carried on seemed to me unworthy of its great model.
But there was also the following consideration: the fate of the German race in the Austrian state depended upon its position in the Reichsrat. Until the introduction of universal secret suffrage there was still a German majority, if an insignificant one, in Parliament. Even this was dangerous; the national attitude of the Social Democrats was unreliable, and in crucial questions concerning Germanity they always fought against German interests to avoid losing their followers among the various alien peoples. Even in those days Social Democracy could not be considered a German party. But the introduction of universal suffrage destroyed the German superiority even numerically. Then there was no longer any obstacle to the further de-Germanization of the state.
Even in those days therefore, the instinct of national self-preservation gave me no love for a representative body in which the German interest was always betrayed instead of represented. But these, like so many other things, were faults to be attributed not to the object in itself but to the Austrian state. I still believed that if the German majority were restored in the representative bodies there would no longer be any cause for opposition on principle so long as the old state continued to exist at all.
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