I quite enjoyed reading your leader and special report on the mushrooming middle class in emerging markets (“Two Million More Bourgeois” and “Burgeoning Bourgeoisie,” February 14, 2009). As you point out, much of the recent boom rested on its shoulders, but there is a real danger that it will sink back into poverty as economic gloom spreads around the world. A pillar of democracy in a boom, you add with justified concern, it might turn toward dictatorship in a crash. After all, the middle class impoverished by the Great Depression supported fascist governments in Europe between World War I and II. Both your leader and special report thus conclude that the new middle class might survive the pains of the downturn if it lasts only a few years, but that a prolonged crash might well undo much of the progress the developing world had only just made toward democracy. Well put. In short, everything depends on whether we are in a recession or a depression. This you leave to the clever reader, though. The way things look to me at this peculiar juncture, the specter of dictatorship looms ever more ominously.