Mein Kampf
ment as such. Hitherto I had seen the ruin of the Austrian Parliament in the lack of a German majority; but now I saw destruction in the whole nature and character of the institution in general.
I saw a whole new series of questions to be answered.
I began to familiarize myself with the democratic principles of majority rule as the foundation of the whole institution; but I was equally attentive to the intellectual and moral values of the gentlemen who were supposed to pursue this object as the chosen of the nations. Thus I became acquainted with both the institution and the men who made it up.
In the course of a few years my perception and understanding allowed me to form a clear and well-rounded image of the most dignified figure of modern times: the Parliamentarian. He was impressed on me in a shape which has never significantly changed since then.
Once again the object-lessons of practical reality had preserved me from smothering in a theory which many people find so seductive at first glance, but which nevertheless belongs among the signs of decay in mankind.
The democracy of the West today is a forerunner of Marxism, which without it would be quite unthinkable. It alone gives this world plague the soil on which the pestilence may spread. Its outward form, parliamentarism, is a “preposterous creature of filth and fire,” but unfortunately at the moment the fire seems to me burnt out.
I am more than grateful to Fate for propounding this question to me in Vienna; I fear that in the Germany of that time I would have made the answer too easy. If my first acquaintance with the ridiculous institution called Parliament had been in Berlin, I might have fallen into the opposite error, and, (not without apparently good reason) have joined those who saw the salvation of people and Empire solely in strengthening the power of the Imperial idea, and thus remained blind strangers to the age and to human nature.
In Austria this was impossible. Here it was not so easy to fall
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