CHAPTER X

BENITO MUSSOLINI

Now that we have traced both the political and philosophical antecedents of what is here called Fascism, since it expresses itself as such, but might perhaps as well be termed the political and philosophical coming of age of Italy as a great nation, we must turn to the man, whose lot it has been to embody such historical forces and bring them to actual realisation.

It may seem rather rash to compare Benito Mussolini with Dante and some people may think it a profanation. Poetry and politics put on the same level; a man considered by many little better than an adventurer (and appearing as such in the biography written by a friend of his, Miss M. Sarfatti); the new constitution far from being complete and, Fascist legislation comprising with a very few great laws, a sequence of decrees suggestive of tyranny! Such a comparison must seem to some absurd, although it is a fact that just as Dante embodied in the Divina Commedia all the philosophy, all the arts and politics of mediæval Italy, Mussolini is now embodying in the new régime all that is great and good in modern Italy.

It may be held, in fact, that political deeds do express the life of minds just as forcibly as poetry, therefore that they do not stand in a position of æsthetic inferiority to the compositions of poets, unless one chooses to compare the politics of a decadent period to the poetry of a great period. It may also be held that “adventurer” is an epithet that befits better the Duce of Miss Sarfatti than the Uomo Novo of Antonio Beltramelli, in whose book the same Duce appears as the herald of an entirely new period of the life of Italy. And the present book is concerned exclusively with what may prove of lasting value in the laws of the government of Mussolini, and does not imply an approval of what may be objectionable in the actual methods of government; it takes the view that tyrannical decrees and the like are inherent in the revolutionary stage of the régime and temporary measures bound to disappear when that stage has been outgrown. Our sensible souls may be shocked when we feel the violence of the hatred with which Dante pursues his enemies right into Hell or Purgatory. Mussolini’s soul is just as sensible and modern as our own. Not only would he forbear from hating his dead adversaries, but he does not hate his enemies even during their life. He can speak of them with the greatest serenity and recall the time when they were his friends without losing his sense of fair appreciation. He can compare with Dante for the violence of his hostility only when hostile attacks are directed against his task and are an impediment to him and his men in what he considers the work laid down for them by Providence.

But this is stretching too far a comparison which has been made merely to explain the impossibility of giving good grounds for the fact that Mussolini was the one man fit to realise in politics all the theoretical ideas and practical tendencies that have been traced in this work. Such facts are as mysterious as the nature of genius. Yet it may not be out of place to note that both Dante and Mussolini have the same love of learning and just too much intuition to contribute to the theoretical life of mind; and that the contrast which exists between some inferior passages of the Divina Commedia and those that make it an immortal poem is not greater than that which exists between what is objectionable in Mussolini’s way of ruling and that which is likely to be of eternal value in the ideals that underlie the whole of his political thought of action.

Through the political realisation of what was potentially included in their political theories France and England have shared, as we have seen, the honour of being the champions of Liberalism and Radical Democracy, just as through the political elaboration of the theories of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, Germany has developed Imperialism and Communism. Now that such political institutions and systems of philosophy have given all that could be had out of them, Italy comes forward and opposes, to what her thinkers consider as being henceforth at best abstract subjectivism, another subjectivism which—being freed from the materialism, mechanism and naturalism, that persisted in thought and life of former generations, being freed also from the practical reasons which compelled the thinkers of those days to oppose religion on account of the Church’s impediments to free researches—can identify itself with Mind, and more specially with the activity of Mind. The individual, the subject to assert itself in the activity of mind must have an object. Self implies Not-self. Therefore, liberty implies law. The citizen implies the state. The employer, or the employed, implies the enterprise for the productivity of which one employs and the other is employed.

In short, after the objectivism of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, after the subjectivism of the modern world, Fascism is the synthesis of both in politics, just as well as in philosophy, since, after the “everything through the force of privilege” of the former and the “everything through the force of numbers” of the latter, it comes and says “everything for everyone that shall deserve it through moral sacrifice and productive activity.” It tries to bring forward the Christian equality of men since it meets everyone on the basis of actual value. It tries to realise fraternity by getting men to feel that their real value is based on their realising as perfectly as possible the intimate relation of self and Not-self which brings each man to see himself in his neighbour, and his neighbour as himself.

Mussolini, to whom we must always turn as the living expression of Fascism, firmly believes that men may be called upon to sacrifice some of their most selfish claims and he hopes to make them realise that they must renounce their empirical selves to create thereby the State as their transcendental self. Fascism does not want men to look upon law—in the broadest sense of the word—as a sort of starry reality inalterable and indifferent to men; it hopes that they may realise how intimately it is related to every citizen, and from the very first year of their school life little children are mentally trained to see it as their own will transcending itself and becoming law in a kind of religious objectivity.

* * * * *

Mussolini, when he was still in his teens, used to sit up late in the inn kept by his father in Forli, and according to a man who used to meet him there, he was even then wont to distress himself at the materialistic form which Socialism had taken in Italy. Day after day he would make the same objection, “It is all right,” he would say, “to better the economic conditions of the people, and you do better them. But I cannot help realising that they are losing more and more the spiritual life which was for them religion and tradition, without taking anything of the higher and nobler side of Socialism.” He had read Andrea Costa’s writings and was devouring the international classics of Socialism, besides his Mazzini, so often quoted by his own father and the Republicans of Forli, who had never read a page of the great idealist. The thought that people were getting more and more indifferent to everything but food or rest, was a nightmare to him. When some twelve years later he became the leader of the Socialist Party in the same town he took up the official attitude of his party against religion. This may be noted in the articles he wrote as the editor of _La Lotta di classe_ during the years 1910–1911. He is an orthodox Socialist, and pours out a lot of anti-religious and even anti-patriotic stuff in a style and with a choice of vocabulary that might befit indifferently an English, a French, or a German Socialist leader of the same period. Here and there, however, a single sentence attracts the careful Italian reader, or the foreigner familiar with all the shades of the language. A personal accent is felt; there is an original idea in an original wording; and it is either a request that the party leaders should be experts and the members qualified artisans; or an appeal highly spiritual, and in a way deeply religious. There are witnesses to the fact that when he had been in the morning issuing an official prohibition of all religious practises he often met in the evening with a theologian to see if there could be a way of re-introducing religion without detriment to Socialism. “For this people,” he would say, “above all the women, _have no conception of life_ at all, since we have deprived them of religion.”

It would be, therefore, a profound mistake to see in Mussolini’s attitude towards the Church, and in the action of his government to reinstate religion all through life, a political move, intended to secure the support of the clergy. Religion is not a useful string on which he plays as the great artist he is, either to secure the support of the Catholics and their clergy, or to keep people quiet and insure their moral education. What he realised between 1900 and 1912, through an intuition of genius, is that the people had no general notion whatever, no concept of what is life, never even realised that they could ask themselves such a question as: What is life, what is the world? and that religion was necessary to them.

Mussolini firmly believes in the necessity of arousing strong religious conviction in the people of every class. He does so on ground provided to him by the example of his mother, by the result of his own observation and experience as a leader, and last, but not least by his reading of de Sanctis’s principal work. That great critic is, indeed, the one link between Vico, Croce, Gentile and Mussolini, whose genius was to create the political system in which their ideas receive practical realisation.

Fascism rejects the very notion of theory as distinct from action and is a constant expression in action of ideas far more easily acted upon than formulated, so that its most ignorant followers go as far as to reject the possibility of anything like an intellectual movement paving the way for them through the preceding generations, whilst they act all along in keeping with the spiritual atmosphere which that intellectual movement has developed and the ideas it has put in circulation. The reason of this lies in the æsthetic genius of Mussolini. Like the greatest artists produced by Italy, he is at once macrocosm and microcosm. The whole of Italy’s past, as in another Dante, converges in him. His avid personality takes it all in, to put it out again with such an indelible stamp upon it that what might be termed its Fascist-ness is the only character left to it.

Now what Mussolini hopes to obtain from the recrudescence of religious life is that the people should get a wider outlook upon _Life_ in the highest sense of the word. He never uses philosophical terms to express it; yet so highly speculative is the notion that Giovanni Gentile is probably the only philosopher to have worked it out, and whosoever did not believe in Providence could be convinced that Providence exists just by studying Croce, Gentile, and the way their work attains realisation at the hands of Mussolini without any previous arrangement. By getting people to have a deeper understanding of life Mussolini means to make them realise that man’s individual life is not by a long way the supreme value, that man’s individual will is not by a long way the supreme law, that man’s individual circumstances are not in themselves by a long way constitutive of _Life_. All these aims he hopes to reach through religion.

When he was a Socialist Leader he was struck by the immorality of women and by the cowardice of men. These would lay traps in which other people might lose their lives, as when they unscrewed the rails of the railway in the province of Forli, but they would not risk their own lives. Being at that time, a most orthodox Socialist he could not think: “let us stop this demoralising propaganda.” He believed that it would be all right in the end, when the end, with a capital E, should have come for this capitalist society based as it was on selfishness. He wanted a religion, and having then a mentality quite anti-historical, he really believed that he could give them a new religion if he could but find it. For this would make them realise, so he thought, that they did not count in themselves but only through their relations to others; and that to realise their better self, they must always look at the whole, which is nothing so long as single men are not conscious of belonging to it, but without which they can do nothing to assert their claims as rights and out of which indeed no claim of theirs can really be a right. Obviously, this is man transcending his own self to assert it through the very negation of its empirical nature.

It is impossible to insist too much on this point for the new conception of life that was reaching speculative expression in the works of Gentile was here, in this intuitive mind of quite a young man, who knew nothing of Gentilian theories, working its way towards practical realisation. Before the way in which he was to proceed from this to the economic theories that _may_ rid the western world of strikes and lock-outs one fact must be put in evidence. From what has been said above, it is clear that his appreciation of the strength of any collectivity must be based on the degree of consciousness with which the single members realise such collectivity. He had at first not made out the import and the consequences of such a view. But the necessity of pleading his own cause, when he was tried in 1911 by the Tribunal of Forli, for having ordered a strike of protest against the Tripoli war, put on his lips a declaration that must be taken into consideration whenever Mussolini’s “Imperialism” is in question. In the records of the tribunal he is stated to have pleaded his case, saying that he did not love his country less than the Nationalists did; the difference was between his idea of a country’s greatness and theirs. He thought that such greatness depended far more on the spiritual and economic level reached by the people of a country, than on its territorial extension, the number of its inhabitants, or the importance of its colonies. To argue that he has changed his mind on this as on other points would not be consistent with facts. Since his advent to power the efficiency of the army and navy has been brought to a higher standard, but their effective numbers have not been increased at all; whilst the greatest care and expense have been dedicated to the reform of education, nothing being spared that can promote a deeper consciousness of the individual, and an immense scheme is a foot to improve the intellectual and spiritual conditions of adults, involving huge expense by the government and great personal sacrifice by the intellectual and artistic classes.

When Mussolini was in Forli he could not satisfy any of his realistic or idealistic exigencies. His intellectual position as a Socialist made him long for a paradise to come, a dream at best; his nature, like that of many in his province, made him long for actual facts. The position proved a difficult one and he was only kept going by the strength of his convictions which were most sincere. The man who was on his staff in the _Lotta di Classe_ is still a workman and a Socialist; and speaks with as much regret for that time as with bitterness for Mussolini’s “desertion from the party,” a “desertion” which nothing will make him see as a consequence of the very sincerity to which he ascribes Mussolini’s power of fascination. It is this man who has furnished the author of this present book with the clue that made it possible to trace back the way through which Mussolini came to realise how unhistorical and, therefore, false was his position.

The adversaries of the Socialists were continually reproaching them for having invented the class struggle. Just because he was absolutely sincere Mussolini minded the accusation very much. For if that was so the responsibility was indeed a heavy one. He started, therefore, looking in history for the origin of that struggle. And it was inevitable that his Italian mentality should, through the process of his researches, emerge in all its national and personal definiteness; that he should reject, more or less consciously, all that is not concrete and actual. The Italians usually call “historical” a true knowledge or realisation of a given situation of fact, whether past or present; again they call “historical” the vision of life as the eternal alteration of such situations through a process which knows no regress.

To his relief Mussolini soon found out that the class struggle had existed always and everywhere, and that it was due to social and financial differences: and this cheered the convinced Socialist in him. His next step was to realise that not only had such a struggle existed in Rome, in Athens, and elsewhere, but that it was actually the main cause of social progress. And with this the Socialist triumphantly exulted.

The triumph was a short one, however, and the cause of this exultation was to prove a mortal blow to his Socialist faith. If class struggle was the main agent of progress and class differences the cause of such struggle, there could be no progress, no movement, when class differences had been abolished. So painful was the conclusion that he must have tried to reject it. When classes should be abolished, every thing would be for the best, granted that it could come to be.

His incursion into the history of the past had given him the one chance his realistic mind had been waiting for to realise that perfection does not exist, that perfection cannot exist, since it is only from the deficiencies of a form of society that the idea of what is to be the next form of society can arise. Obviously, it is by the inconvenience of an actual law that the next law is called into being. Life would have, therefore, to be static when the actual state of society would be perfect. A question remained and indeed was of moment. Could life be static?

The answer could not have waited long for so sharp an observer of life. Life is dialectic. The nature of life was manifest to him in the arts. De Sanctis had taught him to see that, whilst the very power of his own individuality was compelling him to realise that nothing is done but by single men acting, acting however as members of the various collectivities which determined their personalities. He could no longer think of choosing a religion and imposing it on his followers; they had one at hand which had been prepared for them by history. Little by little the truth came. Men did not act for mankind, they acted for their family, for their religion, for their country; they acted to better their conditions or to prevent them from getting worse. To release Man from his traditions was equivalent to taking the roots of a tree from the ground, and condemning it to dry, moulder and rot.

Was, then, Socialism a drug of such a kind that it could only do harm? Surely it had done wonders for the wretched lower classes of Italy! Then the outbreak of the European War spurred him to take the step which had become inevitable. His mind was ready; his genius had reached maturity; circumstances would do the rest.

* * * * *

It is necessary to realise the man and his Dantesque gift for looking at the idea and grasping facts all along, for discharging with personal passion a most impersonal task. It is equally necessary to realise why the people should have wanted him to succeed and give him that support without which his genius would have aborted as a sterile longing for action. According to Croce the act of will of any single man becomes an event and is granted success according to the way in which it stands to the will of the whole, and to the actual situation of fact. Macchiavelli, it must be borne in mind, tried to do with his Tuscan militia what Mussolini has achieved, and he only succeeded in realising how out of keeping with the times his scheme had been. Sadly, this forerunner of Mussolini, not inferior to him in genius or reading, had to sit down and write what the regenerator of Italy would have to do, the necessity of governing in harmony with the times and according to the actual truth of circumstances being one of the principles ever recurring under his pen. “Everyone knows,” says Benedetto Croce, who is by no means a Fascist, in the _Philosophy of the Practical_, printed for the first time in 1908, “that no _vultus instantis tyranni_ can extinguish the freedom of the soul; no ruler, be he ever so strong and violent, can prevent a rebellion.” If people choose to use the word tyrant in the Greek sense of the word they may call Mussolini a tyrant, for he is and will be an unconstitutional ruler until the new institutions are so framed, that the new régime can function normally. But if it is implied by that, as the modern sense of the word allows, that he rules against the people’s will it is merely absurd, and one single fact could prove the contrary. When two years ago he asked that a certain sum should be subscribed in dollars towards the paying to the United States War Debt, the issue was many times what he had asked. It would not be true to facts to omit that although it was not compulsory, there was a good deal of moral pressure made to get the people to subscribe. But surely they did not need to cover it so many times and the excess was indeed most spontaneously subscribed.

The people of Italy do grumble at many things which are done by the Fascists, and anybody would do so. It is mainly, however, individual actions which are the object of complaint and not laws or public services. For it must be kept in mind that the actual form of Mussolini’s government has been called into being by the misgovernment or rather non-government of the people who preceded him in power, and the country felt the need of being governed in one way or another.

It has been shown in the first part of this book why Italy was not governed at all, why no public service could work effectively, why foreign policy had to be so inferior to the real position of the country, why the beautiful peninsula had fallen into a state bordering on anarchy. It is difficult for an Englishman to realise how a country could fall into such conditions. England has five or six centuries of political experience, a length of time more than sufficient to produce electors and representatives able to realise what are the duties of the executive as well as those of the legislature. Everybody in England is familiar with the process through which political forms come into being. People struggle to reach a certain form of government and that moment of dialectic ends when the form is reached; they then apply it more and more fully and during its application discover its limitations; this second movement ends in criticism of the whole thing; finally, people set themselves to remedy its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the full consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied. Thus the people learn to use a new form whilst they are using, then discarding, the one that came before it. In Italy nothing of the sort happened. The political leaders would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was considered “social progress.”

The immediate aftermath of the war in Italy was as we have seen morally a tragedy. It seemed as if something had died, something spiritual. Everything seemed to be going to pieces. Nobody seemed to think, nobody seemed to realise that moral forces, a national consciousness had been produced by the general sacrifice. A few heroes were watching over the flame lit up in the young souls who had learned truth in the bitter experience of war. They were very few indeed, and they could only get a hearing through the actual violence with which they fell on the old political classes, who were intent on convincing the people that the war had to be forgotten as a nightmare, that man must forget it as soon as possible to throw himself again into his pursuit of material well-being.

Whatever the smallness of their number—when Mussolini founded the first _Fascio_ in 1919 they were 150—they were enough to arouse a deep echo in the youth of Italy, which was beginning both for spiritual and practical reasons to conceive life as an energy, a force, a consciousness transcending the limits set by the interests of the individual, bound to upset violently the quiet and selfish life of the man intent on the satisfaction of his most empirical desires.

* * * * *

Mussolini’s belief was that you could make man realise that, if he is the centre of the universe, he is so through his relation to the universe, but that you could not do this by words. The only way to make men realise that selfishness, when it becomes absolute is bound to reduce society to atomistic irrelativeness and thereby to anarchy, was, according to him, _action_. If a body of men were ready to do, through coherent action and sacrifice of their individual wills, what the government ought to have done, then the people would know that they could cease from being bullied by the Bolshevist Socialists and followers of Don Sturzo, provided they were willing to sacrifice their individual wills, as the men of a team of football do when they want to win a match. He felt sure that he could call his countrymen to the sacrifice of life and to the acceptance of the harshest discipline if they could but be induced to cease centring their whole mind upon their precious selves. There was, however, no time to organise a religious revival; and his knowledge of men provided him with the one intuition that could be acted upon at the time. He called on them to defend the value of their own sacrifice in the trenches and in the field. Now that was not cold and distant as the idea of the nation might have proved; it was quite real to them and moved them consequently as nothing else could. Through the action of a few hundreds several hundreds of thousands were induced to fight for the defence of what had been their former action. The fighting however was only on a very small scale and mostly in the provinces where the tyranny of the Reds and Whites had to be broken; the breaking up of that tyranny made the people look upon the Black Shirts as their liberators. Peasant women and children were once more free to go to Church, officers and wounded men were once more free to go about in their uniforms without being attacked or insulted, workmen were once more free to attend their daily work and earn their money as they liked. The Fascists did not have to fight their way to power. They merely took it and were cheered on to taking it.

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As soon as Mussolini was in power he was asked by his ministers what his programme was. He curtly answered “that it was to realise the full value of Italy’s sacrifice in the war.” He had no political programme and was so indifferent to party distinctions that he took ministers from every party, choosing them only according to their qualification as experts. What he required from them was the maximum of efficiency, and the maximum also of personal responsibility.

His first great move was the reform of education. For him the greatness of a country depended on the consciousness of its citizens. The work was naturally entrusted to Giovanni Gentile, who was the greatest authority on pedagogy. He had to face immense difficulty and he did it with such energy and indomitable will that the educational reform became law and was being applied eleven months after the march on Rome. The main features of it are the re-introduction of religious and moral, æsthetic and practical education in the schools where rational instruction had been paramount for twenty years. This was in accord with modern philosophy, reinstating in their lawful places along with imagination and intuition, all the activities of Mind which had not been duly recognised nor sufficiently developed in the last generations. Religion is understood as the one thing capable of providing man with a reasonable outlook upon life as a whole, with a deep consciousness of his own importance as a factor in the world, and with an equally deep consciousness of his nonentity as soon as he ceases to be part of a whole, and considers himself apart from his relations to his family, to his church, to his school, to his country. Æsthetic education is meant to develop the faculty of realising with great definiteness. The child must not describe in his small essays of ten lines or less something that he cannot draw, and he must not draw something different from that which he describes. “Practical” is a very bad term for the development of judgment in children yet it is the latest word of philosophy which is introduced here.

A good deal of the new education in Italy is done through the teaching of history. It may be pointed out, for instance, by the teachers, that Russia has had less importance in the development of civilisation than England or France, though they are so much smaller. This is pointed out as being a proof that the importance of a country has nothing to do either with the area it occupies on the map or with the number of its inhabitants. Athens and Persia may be opposed in the same way. The child is thus gradually brought to realise the creative power of man’s will when it is the “good-will” of the Scriptures. Such will is presented to him as the individual will _with a plus_. That is to say that the man who realises his duty towards his family, his school, country and so on, creates something and thereby is really the collaborator of God.

Another side of this education is the highly ideal notion of actual reality which is enforced. The child is taught that school is not a particular building, but any place where there is a master to teach and pupils to learn. The character of such a place is bound to the two acts of teaching and learning, therefore, their liberty is a sacred thing. He who prevents the master from being heard, the pupils from hearing him and learning what he says, destroys such liberty. Ceasing himself to listen and to learn, he loses his quality as a pupil, therefore, if his schoolfellows kick him out or the master, to protect their liberty and their right to learn, sends him away he has nothing to say, for he has forfeited his rights by ceasing to learn. He is a pupil in as far as he is learning. It is needless to point out that in consequence of this a workman is entitled to his rights as such, only so long as he is a contributor to the productivity of the enterprise in which he is working; that a landowner is the owner of his land as far as he discharges his duty as such, which is of making such land produce as much as possible for himself, for his tenants and for the country; that a man has the rights of a citizen as long as he is conscious of his being one and discharges all the duties correlative to his rights. The Gentilian reform with Mussolini’s authority has been able to infuse a new life into the teachers of the elementary schools. They have taken their work up as an apostolate. Boys and girls know now that manual work is as dignified as any, and that it has the merit of being always in demand and being more productive than shop and office work. They are taught that they must think, when they choose a calling, of their old people whom they may have to help and of the family which they are going to create. On this particular point the success is wonderful and the author has had several opportunities of realising it. In Rome she was met by the request of a widow, the mother of four children, to recommend her eldest son 15 years old, to a senator to see if he could not find him a job as callboy. Objection was made to the choice of the job, so badly paid and so tedious, good at most for a weak or less clever lad; the recommendation, however, was promised out of respect for the mother’s choice. But the morning after the boy appeared, rather shy, and full of apologies. He had understood that the choice of the job had not been approved. Might he say what he felt about it? Then he began to unburden himself. “You know, miss, I cannot stand the notion of opening doors, answering bells and carrying trays.... I want to have a real calling.... If I am a trained workman I can go all over the world, or stay here and marry, helping my mother all along, because I can get 35 lire a day and even more. If I am a real workman ...” He made up his mind to be a printer and was introduced to a publisher.

Religious and patriotic as it is, education in Italy is, moreover, grounded on a deep sense of what are the family duties of man, and on a few sound ideas of what is economic in every man’s life. Economy is by Mussolini transformed into a moral value. In this again we see his political genius going to meet Croce’s theories without knowing anything about them. For Croce, an action is economic when it is due to the will of a well-informed individual, it becomes moral when the individual’s act of will is consonant with the will of the whole. The most typical example is that known under the name of _Campagna del Grano_, which is meant to induce the landowner and his tenants to use the most scientific means of increasing the production of the soil, in order that the country should be either freed from the enormous expenditure of wheat importation or have it balanced by the silk, wine, fruit and oil which should be exported in greater quantities. Travelling teachers go from village to village and are met willingly by the peasants whom they address in the most homely way. First technical suggestions are made with statistics of results obtained in the nearest fields of experiment. Then they are discussed with the men. Finally, these are told that the result will be good for them as they will get more out of their land without their work being much increased, but that they must above all, remember that they will discharge the first of their civic duty; their productive activity is as constructive as that of the great scientist and as noble as their own life in the trenches during the war. You must no longer plough, sow, reap for your own self, that is to say exclusively for your material self, but for the state, which is that same empirical self _plus_ its transcendental complement. Thereby ploughing, sowing and reaping are no longer the work of Man, slave of his material needs, but of Man transcending them, without disregarding them, however, and lifting his daily occupation to the dignity of a moral realisation of his own economic value. The state must, indeed, according to such ideas, be universally present as a moral factor in every branch of its citizen’s activity. It is, in fact, the all-pervading consciousness that man must have of his citizenship which expresses itself as government.

Such an assertion is believed by Fascists to be quite acceptable to the people and where the author has had the possibility of testing the truth of it she had the impression that in a little less than a year the peasants were generally getting used to it, and many acting upon it although they could not have explained it at all. This _moral_ share of the state in every economic interest is that which has made it possible for the government to work out the scheme of the National Syndicates. This has nothing to do with the Fascist Syndicates which were until recently opposed to the Socialist trade unions as one political organisation to another. The new Syndicates are to be of no political colour at all; their action is to be purely economic and they are nearly compulsory.[12] Every man must belong to one of them either as a labourer, a capitalist or an intellectual, the last category containing most professional men. When any economic conflict arises—causes of conflict have been reduced to the lowest possible number—the Syndicate of employers sends its delegates to meet the delegate of the Syndicate of employed. Such delegates are mostly the secretaries of the Syndicates and must belong to the calling of the men whose interests are entrusted to them; then they must have qualified and hold a diploma testifying to their technical and economic knowledge of the problems that they may have to treat. The fact that they must belong to the trade they exercise and actually exercise it, sweeps away all the professional secretaries of trade unions, who, living out of their leadership of the workmen, are ready to do anything to retain their posts. No less important is the necessity of their technical and economical qualification. Yet _as for the moment_ there are no such qualified people to be had and the people are not yet used to choose their representative according to their value in the trade and common-sense _they are appointed by the government. And this is one weak point of the organisation_, although it is obviously a temporary one.

For the rest it is simply wonderful. The delegates of the two syndicates—employed and employers—meet, and they discuss the point at issue. Usually they come to an agreement because the greatest consideration is taken of the economic facts, local conditions of life, supply and demand of work and so on. Failing agreement, the syndicates themselves meet and discuss the matter. If the agreement is not possible the delegates meet again, but in the presence of a special magistrate, who studies the case and whose conclusions are enforced by law. No lock-out or strike is even contemplated; they have become an offence against the community, and as such liable to various penalties. Men are free to produce, but not to destroy.

This brings our study to a conclusion, since to deal with any one point of those which have been merely sketched here would require a whole volume. The people’s will is free so long as what they wish is for the common good and their own good, but it is not free to want anything that is either not for the common good or against it. Football is still the best example. The men of a team freely want to win the match and freely do what they are ordered to do by their captain, but they are not free to show off or to spoil the game, to spite the captain or any one of the men.

Mussolini makes no mystery about it; his party has come into the world as the negation of the Rights of Man as they were formulated in the eighteenth century; as the negation of Liberty as it has been understood, that is to say abstracting it from its correlative term Law; as the negation of democracy as far as democracy is understood, through a wrong interpretation of its Greek root taking people as equivalent to lower class, is quantity opposed to quality—whereas it is equivalent to the nation as a whole; as the negation of the equality of 1789 which was materially and mechanically conceived.

Yet such negations are the preliminary stage to affirmations—the affirmation of the rights of man _arising from his consciousness of duty_; of liberty as the positive term of Law, yet as inseparable from it as light from shadow; of democracy understood as the impossibility of any class willing to rule by force over other classes, be it by the force of wealth, arms, or numbers; finally, the equality of men, both moral and legal, according to which every man’s rights must be proportioned to what he does for the community.

The great new feature of it is the idea of state and citizen upon which the whole Mussolinian legislation and government is based although it seems never to mention it. Whilst in the Anglo-Saxon and French views of political reality the State is a function of the citizen; whilst in the German view, whether in its Imperialistic or Communistic form, the citizen is a function of the state, for modern Italy the state is the consciousness of the citizen transcending itself and postulating itself in religious objectivity.

No class differences, no financial differences may therefore be rendered permanent by the State. No care must be spared that may ensure their eternal mutability. Differences are necessary to permit moral, social, and economic progress; but their fertility lies in their elasticity. If “Avanti” was not the motto of Socialism the Fascists could make it theirs; as it is, reintroducing faith and belief at the basis of man’s life they seem to point to higher moral, political and economical conquests. The only motto that can befit the black shirts movement is therefore _Sursum corda_.

[ FOOTNOTES ]

[1] The author wishes to state that being a Nationalist herself she has been unable to assume towards Nationalism the purely critical attitude that she has kept towards Socialism.

[2] Just as the idea of family in any one individual makes him feel that the rest of the people are to him _not his family_, are to him objective reality, whilst his people are to him THE FAMILY, and part of his subjective reality.

[3] The author has lived in Italy as a student since May, 1913, in constant contact with people of all classes.

[4] To refer to one single district and to facts directly known by the author, it may be stated that in May, 1920, most of the province of Udine having been organised under Don Sturzo’s white banner, the peasants had their minds perverted by the very priests to whom they had looked hitherto for moral guidance, to the extent of starving their own cattle, of ceasing to milk their cows, leaving hundreds of beasts howling day and night for a week. (Some of the land-owners, above all those who were sportsmen, did their best, at the risk of their life, to relieve the poor animals, but could not manage to go round the stables every day.) The present writer is a Roman Catholic, a friend of peasants wherever she goes and an animal lover; she could not therefore speak with equanimity of a party who used the priests of her own church to speak words of violence on the steps of the altar or in the parsonage-houses, making bullies of country folk she has known for thirteen years as excellent people, looking after their cattle with so much humanity that they never sit down to a meal before their beasts are fed. It is therefore better to state a few facts with names and dates. In May, 1920, in San Martino al Tagliamento, Count Francesco di Prampero was sequestered in his house with four men of the white legion mounting guard on his doors, to compel him to yield to the will of the priests and their followers. The same might be said of all the land-owners of the villages where Don Sturzism flourished. But Count Francesco di Prampero is selected here as being such a friend of peasants, that he never lived with his family, since he was in his teens preferring the company of his tenants, although he belongs to the most ancient aristocracy.

In the same year groups of followers of Don Sturzo and some _Arditi Bianchi_ went about with their white flag compelling people to kiss the hem of it and caning those who would not, the _Arditi Bianchi_, who were the armed legion of the party, being ready to shoot the obdurate men or women. As a matter of fact, the most terrible harm was that of the sacraments, in a province as religious as that of Udine, so that it is no wonder that Benedict XV, asked by the present writer if he could approve such things, was absolutely shocked and let her understand that since the war it was his greatest torment.

Space compels to bring this note to a conclusion, and it may be said that one of the foremost lieutenants of Don Sturzo, in that Province, was Monsignor Gori, a canon of the cathedral of Udine, a man who rejoiced over the defeat of his country at Caporetto, befriended the invaders, and betrayed two women who had said to him that they were praying for the victory of the allies, so that on his denunciation they were condemned by the Austrians. This may give a fair idea of what was a party that took such a man not only in its ranks, but as a main agent, knowing him to be even then, before the advent of Fascism, in antagonism with his Archbishop, whose patriotism has since brought upon him the underhand persecution of the clergy that had been contaminated by Don Sturzism even in its ecclesiastical discipline.

[5] See Francisco de Sancti’s _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_, Lateza, Bari, vol. ii, chap. i.

[6] _Philosophy of the Practical._ 1912. Macmillan, London.

[7] Quoted by Wildon Carr’s _The Philosophy of Mind_ of Benedetto Croce.

[8] _Op. cit._

[9] _Op. cit._, page 491.

[10] The same can be said of the Israelite community.

[11] Negativity does not imply unreality.

[12] The way in which they are compulsory is not quite simple; but the fact is that when the new institutions are framed men will perhaps get their political rights as members of the corporations.

INDEX

Alberti, Leone Battista, 87

Alfieri, 168

Ardigo, 164

Aretino, 101

Ariosto, 101

Aristotle, 65, 66, 67, 94, 107, 108, 172, 216

Bacon, Francis, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 92, 93, 120, 146, 191

Bacon, Roger, 64

Bainville, 114, 115

Bayle, 146, 147

Beltramelli, 212

Berkeley, 149

Bodin, 94

Boccacio, 81

Bassuet, 82

Bismarck, 25, 26

Cairoli, 21, 22

Campanella, 100, 101, 105

Carducci, 43

Carlo, Alberto, 14

Cavour, 10, 14, 33, 185

Cherbury, Herbert of, 142

Corneille, 116

Cola di Rienzo, 81

Costa, Andria, 27, 28, 90, 215

Carradini, 30, 32, 33, 40

Crispi, 20, 24

Croce, 88, 89, 125, 130, 170–188, 189, 216, 222

Cromwell, 96, 99, 100

Cumberland, 141

Cuoco, Vincenzo, 122, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 168

Dante, 78, 79, 80, 81, 168, 212, 213

D’Annunzio, 48, 52

D’Azeglio Massimo, 11

Depretis, 25

De Ruggiero, G., 163

De Sanctis, 16, 77, 83, 101, 104, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 216

Descartes, 64, 66, 67, 68, 110, 114–124, 126, 146, 191

Ercole, 89

Federzoni, 30, 32, 33, 40

Ficino Marsilio, 87

Fiorentino, 164

Frederick II, 77, 87

Fichte, 213

Garibaldi, 10, 11, 20, 24, 33

Gentile, 35, 59, 60, 76, 125, 130, 132, 171, 188–210

Gioberti, 16, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171

Ghibellines, 78, 79, 83

Giolitti, 37, 52

Grotius, 93, 94, 95, 127

Guarini, 105

Guicciardini, 103, 104, 111, 112

Guelphs, 78, 79, 83

Hegel, 62, 76, 98, 154, 159, 165, 208, 209, 213

Hobbes, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 109, 111, 122, 127, 129, 146

Hume, 98, 146

Johnson, 82

Kant, 140, 149, 154, 162, 164, 203, 208

Louis XIV, 114, 115, 116, 124

Landino, 87

Lévy Bruhl, 62

Leibniz, 124, 163

Locke, 100, 125, 132, 138, 189

Machiavelli, 40, 41, 42, 86, 88, 89, 90, 101, 102, 103, 110, 112, 168, 172, 174

Mâle, 69, 72

Mazzini, 11, 14, 20, 33, 155, 159, 160, 161, 168, 185, 215

Malespini, A., 77

Maritain, 117

Marx, 62

Monnier, Ph., 87

Melzi, 157

Mill, 164

Michelangelo, 166

Minghetti, 24

Montaigne, 146

Montesquieu, 147, 149

Mussolini, 29, 35, 37, 43, 76, 77, 88, 103, 156, 157, 158, 159, 170, 171, 177, 180, 186

Nitti, 52

Newton, 146

Orange, William, 100, 138

Pascal, 146

Pagano, 155

Plato, 135

Plutarch, 133

Poliziano, 167

Petrarch, 80, 81, 83

Piccolomini, 82

Pisano Nicolo, 76

Rosmini, 16, 159, 162, 164, 171

Reggio, E., 75

Rousseau, 107, 126, 128, 138, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 207

Salandra, 37, 42

Saitta, 149

San Giuliano, 37

Sarfatti, 212

Savonarola, 162

Scholasticism, 63, 64, 108, 111, 119, 128

Shaftesbury, 141, 142

Sonnino, 37, 42

Solmi, 76

Spaventa, 164, 165

Spinoza, 89, 129

Sturzo, and his party, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 225

St. Anselm, 64

St. Augustin, 119, 121

St. Thomas, 64, 94, 108, 129, 208

Tasso, 105

Toland, 142, 143

Tocco, 164

Vico, 65, 80, 98, 111, 124–136, 149, 154, 163, 165, 168, 172, 216

Villari, 163

Vittorio, Emmanuele, 14

Wildon Carr, 190

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, LETCHWORTH, HERTS

~~~ Transcriber’s notes ~~~

No attempt has been made to correct or normalize the spelling of proper names or non-English text. The index is in original order. Footnotes have been gathered at the end of the text, before the index. The included cover is a modified version of the book’s title page and is placed in the public domain.