This is a book about dictatorship and democracy. Its treatment of these two patterns of government is not conventional. Instead of setting the one against the other, it proposes to demonstrate how the institutions and methods of dictatorship have been used by the freemen of the modern democracies during periods of severe national emergency. It is written in frank recognition of a dangerous but inescapable truth: "e;No form of government can survive that excludes dictatorship when the life of the nation is at stake."e;