CHAPTER III

THE BOOK OF LIFE

I plunged forward into big politics when I settled in Milan at the head of the Avanti. My brother Arnaldo went on with his technical studies and my sister Edvige, having the offer of an excellent marriage, went to live with her husband in a little place in Romagna called Premilcuore. Each one of us took up for himself the torn threads of the family. We were separated, but in touch. We did not reunite again, however, until August 1914, when we met to discuss politics and war. War had come—war—that female of dreads and fascinations.

Up till then I had worked hard to build up the circulation, the influence and the prestige of the Avanti. After some months the circulation had increased to more than one hundred thousand.

I then had a dominant situation in the party. But I can say that I did not yield an inch to demagoguery. I have never flattered the crowd, nor wheedled any one; I spoke always of the costs of victories—sacrifice and sweat and blood.

I was living most modestly with my family, with my wife Rachele, wise and excellent woman who has followed me with patience and devotion across all the wide vicissitudes of my life. My daughter Edda was then the joy of our home. We had nothing to want. I saw myself in the midst of fierce struggle, but my family did represent and always has represented to me an oasis of security and refreshing calm.

Those years before the World War were filled by political twists and turns. Italian life was not easy. Difficulties were many for the people. The conquest of Tripolitania had exacted its toll of lives and money in a measure far beyond our expectation. Our lack of political understanding brought at least one riot a week. During one ministry of Giolitti I remember thirty-three. They had their harvest of killed and wounded and of corroding bitterness of heart. Riots and upheavals among day laborers, among the peasants in the valley of the Po, riots in the south—even separatist movements in our islands. And in the meantime, above all this atrophy of normal life, there went on the tournament and joust of political parties struggling for power.

I thought then, as I think now, that only the common denominator of a great sacrifice of blood could have restored to all the Italian nation an equalization of rights and duties. The attempt at revolution—the Red Week—was not revolution as much as it was chaos. No leaders! No means to go on! The middle class and the bourgeoisie gave us another picture of their insipid spirit.

We were in June then, picking over our own affairs with a microscope.

Suddenly the murder of Serajevo came from the blue.

In July—the war.

Up till that event my progress had been somewhat diverse, my growth of capacity somewhat varied. In looking back one has to weigh the effect upon one of various influences commonly supposed powerful.

It is a general conviction that good or bad friends can decisively alter the course of a personality. Perhaps it may be true for those fundamentally weak in spirit whose rudders are always in the hands of other steersmen. During my life, I believe, neither my school friends, my war friends, nor my political friends ever had the slightest influence upon me. I have listened always with intense interest to their words, their suggestions and sometimes to their advice, but I am sure that whenever I took an extreme decision I have obeyed only the firm commandment of will and conscience which came from within.

I do not believe in the supposed influence of books. I do not believe in the influence which comes from perusing the books about the lives and characters of men.

For myself, I have used only one big book.

For myself, I have had only one great teacher.

The book is life—lived.

The teacher is day-by-day experience.

The reality of experience is far more eloquent than all the theories and philosophies on all the tongues and on all the shelves.

I have never, with closed eyes, accepted the thoughts of others when they were estimating events and realities either in the normal course of things or when the situation appeared exceptional. I have searched, to be sure, with a spirit of analysis the whole ancient and modern history of my country. I have drawn parallels because I wanted to explore to the depths on the basis of historical fact the profound sources of our national life and of our character, and to compare our capacities with those of other people.

For my supreme aim I have had the public interest. If I spoke of life I did not speak of a concept of my own life, my family life or that of my friends. I spoke and thought and conceived of the whole Italian life taken as a synthesis—as an expression of a whole people.

I do not wish to be misunderstood, for I give a definite value to friendship, but it is more for sentimental reasons than for any logical necessity either in the realm of politics or that of reasoning and logic. I, perhaps more than most men, remember my school friends. I have followed their various careers. I keep in my memory all my war friends, and teachers and superiors and assistants. It makes little difference whether these friendships were with commanding officers or with typical workers of our soil.

On my soldier friends the life of trench warfare—hard and fascinating—has left, as it has upon me, a profound effect. Great friendships are not perfected on school benches, nor in political assemblies. Only in front of the magnitude and the suggestiveness of danger, only after having lived together in the anxieties and torments of war, can one weigh the soundness of a friendship or measure in advance how long it is destined to go on.

In politics, Italian life has had a rather short panorama of men. All know one another. I have not forgotten those who in other days were my companions in the socialistic struggle. Their friendship remains, provided they on their part acknowledge the need to make amends for many errors, and provided they have been able to understand that my political evolution has been the product of a constant expansion, of a flow from springs always nearer to the realities of living life and always further away from the rigid structures of sociological theorists.

My Fascist friends live always in my thoughts. I believe the younger ones have a special place there. The organization of Fascism was marked and stamped with youth. It has youth’s spirit and it gathered youth, which, like a young orchard, has many years of productiveness for the future.

Though it appears that the obligations of governing increase around me every day, I never forget those who were with me—the generous and wise builders, the unselfish and faithful collaborators, the devoted soldiers of a new Fascist Italy. I follow step by step their personal and public fortunes.

Some minds appear curious as to what territories my reading has explored. I have never attached my name or my mind to a certain school, and as I have already said, I never believed that books were absolute and sure viaticums of life.

I have read the Italian authors, old and new—thinkers, politicians, artists. I have always been attracted by the study of our Renaissance in all its aspects. The nineteenth century, with its artistic and spiritual contrasts, classicism and romanticism and their contrasts, has held my attention. I have studied thoroughly the period of our history called _risorgimento_ in its moral and political essence.

I have analyzed with great care all the development of our intellectual life from 1870 up to this moment.

These studies have occupied the most serene hours of my day.

Among foreign writers, I have meditated much upon the work of the German thinkers. I have admired the French. One of the books that interested me most was the “Psychology of the Crowd” by Gustave Lebon. The intellectual life of the Anglo-Saxons interests me especially because of the organized character of its culture and its scholastic taste and flavor.

But all that I have read and am reading is only a picture that is unfolded before my eyes without giving me an impression strong enough to make an incision in me. I draw out only the cardinal points that give me above all and first of all the necessary elements for the comparison of the essence of the different nations.

I am desperately Italian. I believe in the function of Latinity.

I came to these conclusions after and through a critical study of the German, Anglo-Saxon and Slavonic history and that of the world; nor have I for obvious reasons neglected the history of the other continents.

The American people, by their sure and active creative lines of life, have touched, and touch, my sensibility. For I am a man of government and of party. I endlessly admire those who make out of creative work a law of life, those who win with the ability of their genius and not with the intrigue of their eloquence. I am for those who seek to make technic perfect in order to dominate the elements and give to men more sure footings for the future.

I do not respect—I even hate—those men that leech a tenth of the riches produced by others.

The American nation is a creative nation, sane, with straight-lined ideas. When I talk with men of the United States it does not occur to me to use diplomacy for winning or persuading them. The American spirit is crystalline. One has to know how to take it and possibly win it over with a watchful responsiveness rather than with cunning words. As the reserves of wealth are gone now from the continents to North America, it is right that a large part of the attention of the world should be concentrated upon the activity of this nation that has men of great value, economists of real wisdom and scholars that are outlining the basis of a new science and a new culture. I admire the discipline of the American people and their sense of organization. Certainly every nation has its periods. The United States is now in the golden age. It is necessary to study these tendencies and their results, and this is not only in the interest of America but in the interest of the world.

America, a land harboring so many of our emigrants, still calls to the spirit of new youth.

I look to her youth for her destinies and the preservation of her growing ideals, just as I look to the youth of Italy for the progress of the Fascist state. It is not easy to remember always the importance of youth. It is not easy to retain the spirit of youth.

It was fortunate for me that in the trenches of the Carso—one of the bloodiest and most terrible spots of all the Allied battle fronts and in the vicissitudes of difficult experiences in the struggle with life, I did not leave my own youth behind.