[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author, who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”]

These are the times that try men’s souls. Hammas has won the Palestinian elections. In Iraq an insurgency rages. Iran has rejected further snap inspections by the U.N.’s nuclear inspectors, as its increasingly-conservative Islamic regime seeks an atomic arsenal. Out of China comes word that Internet provider Yahoo knuckled under to government pressure and gave up information on a dissident. In short, America’s crusade to democratize the globe has run into some significant roadblocks.

More and more frequently, as this bad news builds up, I hear friends, colleagues and the media ask whether “those people” will ever embrace democracy. Islamic and Asian history, traditions, and cultures all count against the rise of “real” democratic regimes in the Middle and Far East, many argue.

Well, maybe so… but before we cut our losses and run back behind our borders, we might well recall the rocky road to our American democracy. America’s Revolutionary War lasted eight long years. Our current Constitution required two tries, the first being our Articles of Confederation, which left too much power in the hands of 13 independent states. Four more years of Civil War were required to tie up the loose ends --- most notably the enslavement of millions of fellow human beings --- the Founding Fathers left dangling.

Currently, I am teaching a course on American ethnic groups at Rider University, where I am legal counsel. My students are surprised to learn that in the mid-Nineteenth Century, Irish immigrants were caricatured in American newspapers as simian creatures incapable of assimilating. Their Tammany Hall machine was considered a threat to true democratic procedures.

A half-century later, Italians and East Europeans were viewed by Irish-Americans in much the same negative light. In 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, tried, convicted and condemned more because they were confessed anarchists than because the evidence proved them guilty of robbery and murder. Who could blame the jury for believing they were killers? Between 1894 and 1914, anarchists killed six Western heads of state, including President McKinley in 1901. Just five days after Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted, on September 16, 1920 a car bomb exploded outside the Morgan Bank on Wall Street, killing thirty-three people. An anarchist-associate of theirs, Mario Boda, was the ‘perp.’ Little wonder that many Americans doubted that immigrants from Europe’s south and east would ever embrace democratic principles.

Some eight decades after the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzette and a century-and-a-half after the great waves of Irish immigration, an Irish-American president and his brother Bobby rank high among America’s pantheon of political martyrs, and two Italian-Americans currently sit on our Supreme Court.

Let’s also recall what once was thought of women’s fitness for participation in the American polity. When Susan B. Anthony was arrested and tried for “illegal voting” in 1872-73, one newspaper observed, “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon.... If these women in the Eighth Ward offer to vote, they should be challenged, and if they take the oaths and the Inspectors receive and deposit their ballots, they should all be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." A year later the Supreme Court said, “The Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and… the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not… void.”

In 1905 Grover Cleveland commented, “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.” Today, this sounds silly and absurd.

Still, none of this ‘proves’ that democracy can or will take hold in Iraq or China or Palestine. All I can add, before closing, is that the last 15 years or so have seen equally-astonishing occurrences: the collapse of the “Evil Empire” in Russia; an end to South African apartheid without a blood bath; the rapid rise of a capitalist economy parallel to a communist polity in the Peoples Republic of China.

All I can ask is, “Are there not some things for which it’s worth risking everything? And is it possible that a democratic globe is one of them?” American history suggests to me that the odds justify the gamble.