CHAPTER III

NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM

Under such circumstances what was the government for the political classes? A coach in a land of brigands; for the most popular elements a coach to be attacked on the roadside; for the better elements, a coach they had a right to drive, whip in hand. Every man stood up against the government either begging or threatening; so that it is no wonder that the next generation of gentlemen mostly stood aside and shunned politics, seeing that at best the men who mixed in it were moved by selfish ambition, or were a vulgar crew of Arrivists and mischief plotters. Abstention on the one side was, however, a form of selfishness, as harmful to the state as Arrivism on the other. Provided they kept clean hands, the abstentionists did not mind that the national conscience should be either corrupted or lulled to sleep by the people whose interest it was that it should slumber. Obviously their withdrawal from public life had the same cause as the ambition and the unscrupulous opportunism of the others. After fifty years of heroic life and feelings, they wanted to attend to their own business and enjoy life privately. Public cares and struggles had been the order of the day for half a century, and public conscience relaxed; with a sudden eclipse of national consciousness, Italy lost the pride of autonomy in foreign affairs and ceased to realise in deeds the part it had to play in the history of the world.

Its foreign policy is the best index of the spiritual conditions of the period, and according to the historian, Michele Rosi (who is neither a Fascist nor a Liberal, nor a Socialist, because he is a man born to put together facts, historical facts, and live a passionate life among them instead of living it among men) the line of conduct of Italian foreign ministers at this stage can be described as the policy of men who distrusted themselves more then they distrusted others. Rosi does not say so, but the facts he puts together do say so.

Of this the best proof was the Triple Alliance. In 1873 Marco Minghetti went with King Vittorio Emmanuele II to Berlin and to Vienna to discuss a second alliance with Germany and more cordial relations with the Austrian court. The followers of Garibaldi raised an outcry as they saw in this a sure proof that the King of Italy was giving up Trento and Trieste, whereas it had never been thought in the past that Rome or Venice might have been so abandoned. In Parliament, however, the Left was quite willing to lean on the shoulder of Germany, and was submitting even to an alliance with Austria, although some of the members had dark remembrances of its rule. But at the same time they flirted with France, who was going more and more to the Left, and whose anti-clericalism seemed to cheer on their own anti-Catholicism.

In 1877 Francesco Crispi, the best statesman of Italy at the time, one of those men of the Left whose mentality brought them mostly to think and often to act as if they had belonged to the Right, made a diplomatic tour to the capitals of Germany, Austria, France and England. He had one open aim, and another one not quite so fully acknowledged, which was to look for support against a possible aggression that was feared both from Paris and Vienna. The impression he received was that Berlin might accept an alliance with Italy against France, on the understanding that Austria would be left free to do what she liked in the East. Thirty years before, Italy, still in the making and far from seeing yet her way to unity, had attacked single-handed the greatest empire of Europe in an offensive war; now, out of fear of a possible attack from France, which Bismarck himself declared very unlikely, she entered into an alliance from which she received only orders and prohibitions. When the Congress of Berlin took place, all that the representative of Italy could do was of so little avail, that the Germans declared that the French and the Italians had to settle the question of Tunis between themselves. This did not admit of any compensation to Italy for the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and expansion in the East. The Italian policy at that congress betrayed a total incapacity to display the policy of a great State in foreign affairs. The reasons were threefold, the men in power had a very poor understanding of the forces and the interests of the country and, in consequence, could not act according to these; they were holding on to ideologies, that had served their time and whose high-sounding rhetoric could only help them to hide the vacuum of their minds; finally, they had a sense that their home affairs were getting more and more out of hand and this feeling may have been the most cramping of all the circumstances in which they stood.

Negative as it was, the attitude of the government was in harmony with that of Parliament. When, in January, 1879, the Senate disapproved of its foreign policy, the head of the government, who was Depretis, shifted all responsibility by saying that, as Prime Minister, he had in that department followed faithfully the traditions of the Right, although he belonged to the Left. In February of the same year, Mussolino strongly advised them to enter into an alliance with Germany; he knew, said he, that Bismarck would accept it unwillingly, as he believed the Italians to be unfaithful, but that he would do so nevertheless, needing Italy against France. Nothing could be less heroic, than a Senate which had good grounds to feel pride in the newly achieved national independence, and was yet so low spirited that it could accept an alliance on such grounds.

The ideal of the Risorgimento had been realised, and as the new leaders _had no new ideals_ they had nothing further to realise; they were bodies without souls, with nothing that might give them a chance to display the gifts with which nature had so largely endowed them. Materialists in philosophy they strove to make the country more and more materialist, fighting religion under the names of clericalism and obscurantism.

Obviously what kept the various governments of Italy from having a dignified foreign policy was that the country was in a state bordering on anarchy. One cause of this was lack of experts in all the political classes, devoid, as the best men were, of personal or traditional experience to help in the application of their imported legislation; but the main cause was undoubtedly the amorphous state of the working classes. If man is to be called a political animal, the labourers of Italy were not men fifty years ago. They did not care what happened and did not think they had anything to say in the matter: they were politically unconscious. Not that they were stupid: their art, their songs, their traditions attest the contrary.

Their political unconsciousness, far from making things easier, rendered a good Liberal government very nearly impossible; for apathy and indifference in the lower class, while it may be very well under an absolute monarchy of the patriarchal type, under a Liberal constitution is apt to prove a curse. First, the lower middle class kept drawing men from the people, and these men, with the natural gift of adaptation the Italian shows to a greater degree than the slower northern races, rose too quickly and too quickly became conscious of their plebian force and of the opportunities offered to them by the difficulties under which the government was working. Among these men and among the crowds of half-intellectuals employed by the State in the innumerable offices created by the centralising administration, in the national schools, in the railways, post services and so on, the members of Parliament, who belonged to the Left, recruited their votes. How quickly these electors realised that their chances of getting all the political importance in their hands rested on the extension of the franchise need not be emphasised. The dates are eloquent, Rome became the capital of Italy in 1870, in 1882 the franchise is extended, and immediately a workman, Maffi, and a pure Socialist, Andrea Costa, are elected.

Without attempting a sketch of the development of Socialism in Italy, it must be said that it certainly did a great deal of good to the country. It aroused the working masses from their slumber and bettered their material conditions, which badly wanted bettering. To stir the people out of their amorphous state and make them conscious of their rights was a very wholesome operation. It would have been better to have made them realise at the same time that rights never go without duties, and that to co-operate in public life they had to undertake the one in order to get the other. But this, however, was more than could be expected from agitators, who often had, themselves, a very poor notion of the relation of right and duties. Their incitement to the people was to make material well-being, the ultimate end of all effort.

Vulgar as it was, yet it was the proper aim for a materialistic age, and it had the advantage of being concrete, positive, and within range of the people’s rudimentary political understanding. Therefore it worked. It had the first quality that an idea must have to move people to action; it corresponded to the real needs of the workers.

The nobler side of Socialism, that which had made it highly idealistic and has made its ultimate end a dreamy Messianism, did not strike root in Italy. It did not appeal to the people, and whenever it fascinated some stray poet or idealist, like Andrea Costa or Mussolini’s father, they failed to arouse an echo in the minds of the labourers. This should have been sufficient to show that it did not suit the Italian mentality. Mankind, the fraternity of mankind, the lost paradise reconquered by the mutual love of men, could not mean much to Italian ears. It sounded abstract, and at best did not show much chance of being realised by the present generation. The Socialist leaders had to attract followers with more concrete things, with plans that could be realised, and to arouse in them a passion for an actual object. Consequently they harped on the necessity of getting better wages for less work. They planned Labour organisations which gradually grew stronger, and they taught the workers to hate their employers.

Yet this was not the worst part of the leaders’ activity; that was the corrupting consciousness they gave the workers of an unlimited political power without any corresponding duties. Out of unfairly treated men they made bullies, most unhappy bullies, the worst kind of bullies. The torture of Mussolini’s youth was this rapid decadence of Socialism in Italy, although it had the advantage over other parties of a stock of general ideas and a definite programme. It was only the weakness of other parties which made it look strong until the war and during the years that followed the peace; for as far back as 1910 the historic ideas it had brought to Italy had yielded their crop. Had it not been so, Socialism, between 1918 and 1920, would have worked out in open revolution. As it was, it had built up a class organisation that was the first regular Party in modern Italy, and this meant considerable experience for the whole nation; it had besides bettered the material conditions of life of the lower class and awakened them to political consciousness, which is a contribution to the development of the country as a modern State that cannot be overrated.

Liberalism, be it of the Right or of the Left, had had an Italian form, which had proved its consonance with the historical position of the country by the efficiency with which it had realised its ideal. Italy, free from foreign rule and politically one under the House of Savoy, was doubtless the creation of Italian Liberalism. But as a home governing party its inefficiency was obvious; one may think that its failure was due to its non-national stock of ideas, which led to the application of foreign legislation to a country whose needs were not the same as those of the nations in which this administrative and political Liberalism had come out of a long historical evolution.

Socialism, on the other hand, was yeast, and as yeast it was very good for Italy, for the unleavened masses rose into shape and life under its action; thereby emerging from their amorphousness they entered into the political world and brought with them the force and life of numbers. It brought them also to the level of the European proletariat and introduced the Party discipline and organisation that the other Italian parties had not needed, as their singleness of aim and the loftiness of their ideals had been sufficient to keep their high-minded members in unity. Yet it proved a curse, as its leaders were unable to realise that the wretched means they had to resort to, in order to arouse men into action, were due to the fact that the higher side of Socialism did not fit the mentality of the people.

Another party must be now considered, and that commands a great deal of respect from any foreigner that may have watched with loving eyes the life of Italy: Nationalism. Corradini and Federzoni may be looked upon as its leaders, and their followers were a mere handful of men. They had a clear notion of what they wanted, and to a certain extent they may be considered as the rightful heirs of the Risorgimento. Again they were all gentlemen, gentlemen being taken as the English equivalent of _vir_, implying the sterling quality of the individual and not at all his social position or his æsthetic refinement, which may be merely the consequence of wealth. Small minorities are always to be found at the origin of any great political movement as it is the conviction of the few which carries away the multitude of men. But then the crucial point is that their convictions must have magnetic attraction for the general public. And the Nationalists had not this. Their ideas were too high and, at the same time, they were obsolete, besides being no more Italian than those of Liberalism or Socialism.

The Nationalists’ idea of a nation was as materialist as their aims were idealist.[1] Now this would be sufficient to condemn to sterility the best wills in the world. To state this plainly, the easiest way is to take man as a simile for nation. There are two ways of looking at a man: he is _one out of many_, or he is _the one central reality_. As one out of many he knocks in every sense against the reality of the many, and is therefore identified by his very limitations. Such a conception of the man is evidently negative. He is appreciated not so much by what he actually does, but by what he has done, or possesses; not so much by what he is, but by the rank he occupies, and which may often be determined independently of his ACTUAL value. But as the one central reality a man cannot come into competition with other objects of appreciation; he can no longer be gauged from outside. Now, obviously, from the world of objective and natural reality, we are shifting to the subjective and spiritual world. We have in front of us no longer an individual belonging to the world of things—we have a person. Common wisdom has for centuries professed that to understand a person’s motives it is necessary to put oneself in that person’s position; and daily experience shows that we understand the people we love better, because we can make ourselves one with them and judge them from their own point of view. To appreciate a personality this method is indispensable; for it is not in the deeds of his past that a man must be judged—he may have been a hero in the last war and be a coward in his present family life—they are now extrinsic to him, unless he goes on living them and making them for ever his spiritual experience. He must be judged by what he is doing actually. Neither must one measure him by his property, but by what he is still able to produce; nor by the regard or contempt of the people who surround him, which is based on what he has done; nor on what his people were, but by what he actually is. None of these conditions of appreciation is fulfilled as long as we look at a man from outside and weigh his manly worth by comparing his achievement, or his property, to that of other people. Past deeds should not raise him one whit in our appreciation unless he continues them with perfect conscience of their value, for their actual and his personal value depend exclusively of the conscience he has of such value and of his aptitude to keep it actual.

Of this fact Corradini and his friends had excellent examples in Italy. Some of the landlords, who owned relatively small estates and quite insufficient capital, managed to bring their land to the highest rate of productiveness, so that the actual production was superior to that of estates of a much bigger acreage. The owners of the _latifondi_, on the other hand, were not all sufficiently rich to have their lands ploughed, and those who were did not always do so, although some Roman princes did cultivate thoroughly, very often as much from patriotism as from the wish to increase their incomes. Conspicuous among them were some leading Nationalists. They could see from this that the importance of a man as a landlord was not altogether dependent on the area of his estate and on his capital, and that it varied according to the consciousness he had of what the value of his estate should be and the capacity he had for realising it. But they did not think of the nation as of a man whose value, practically as well as spiritually, depends not so much on the capacity he has for doing things, as on his being conscious of such capacity. Therefore, they looked at Italy measuring it by the poor figure it cut in foreign policy, by its colonies, by its financial weakness, comparing it always in their minds with other countries; in a word, judging it from outside as if it had belonged to the field of natural science instead of belonging to the world of history, which is after all the world of Mind.

Thank God, however, “_le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît pas_,” and some of these men, Corradini above all, were men with great hearts and deep souls. Out of faith and love of their country they realised what their conception of political reality would have kept them from seeing, namely that the root of all the evil was that the people of Italy had almost allowed the stifling of their souls. Religion in some provinces had been, so to speak, extirpated by the anti-Catholic democrats, republicans and radicals; both religion and patriotism had been lulled to sleep by the Socialists. The only political cell still living and strong was the family. The Nationalists were beset by another cause of sterility, the men these leaders recruited ... did they share their religious and truly patriotic motives? All did not, and that was the misery of it. Yet Corradini and some others were men of faith, just as much as Cavour and Mazzini had been; they could get men to join them in holding aloft a torch whose flame flickered in the cold twilight of Garibaldi’s Italy. They kept the sacred fire of Rome burning, and openly preached self-sacrifice, whilst great artists and sceptic scholars invited the youth of the upper class to enjoy life and shut themselves up in selfish existence.

The Nationalists were men of faith, and as everything is possible to him that believeth, they kept working for their cause a certain number of followers who had joined them in the hope that better openings would be obtained for the export of Italian products and for Italian emigrants if a strong Nationalist foreign policy could be substituted for the existing weak one. For the Nationalists the nation was a transcendent reality, objectively considered as to the individual. Such conception is not peculiar to Italy by any means; yet it was modified in its Italianisation, but always in a way that made it more and more a policy for the gentry. A good deal of culture (I don’t mean philosophy, but a true sense of history and a sound judgment) was at the basis of it, and this did not tend to make it a popular movement. To sacrifice oneself to something transcendent, to an historical construction, is not for the mob: not even for the lower middle classes, absorbed as they are by the problems of daily life.

There we touch what really distinguishes the Fascists from the Nationalists, for whom the State belongs to natural reality, is transcendent in its relation to the individual, and negatively conceived in its relation to other states, where it appears one amongst many. It is a great engine that needs the co-operation of all the citizens to make it work, but it _does_ exist independently of the citizens. Philosophically this conception belongs to the eighteenth century. For the Fascists, the State is not transcendent in its relation to the citizens: it is immanent; it is their own spiritual and economical life in its political summing up. In its relation to other states it is not negatively conceived as one amongst many; for its citizens, it is their national self, whilst the other nations are constitutive of their national non-self. The positiveness of the State for its citizens implies therefore, for them, the negativeness of the other states.[2] Such a conception sounds merely theoretical, and yet it was not born in words. Its painful birth was the outcome of Mussolini’s experience as a Socialist and a party leader. Words have never been given to this newest of all the conceptions that Italy is contributing to the world of politics except in an answer he gave to the judges who, in 1911, were condemning him at Forli. Besides this very curt answer, he never expressed it except in deeds, so that the form under which it is given here is contributed by the author. The rest of the doctrine that can be inferred from his four years’ speeches, legislation and administration, can be traced in the whole of the philosophical works produced by Italian idealism; but this, although perfectly consonant above all with Gentile’s theories, was certainly one of Mussolini’s most original ideas.

The task of the government is to raise the level and increase the value of the citizens, attending not to the organisation of every branch of life manifestation, but to the regulation or rather systematisation of such organisation in order to have always the most intimate fusion of state and citizens. The empirical self requires that the peasant should plough his field, sow the seed and reap the harvest. All this he is bound to do to satisfy his material needs and the work thus considered is certainly not ennobling, since man works as the slave of hunger. Fascism says to the peasant: “Thou shalt no longer plough, sow, reap for thyself, that is to say _exclusively for thy material self, but for the State, which is that same empirical self plus its transcendental complement_.” Hence 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 thereby his daily occupation to the dignity of moral realisation of his own economic value.

The only precedent that this application of Fascism seems to have had is the Christian sanctification of work, which is undoubtedly one of the noblest gifts bestowed by our religion upon mankind. The study of Fascism as a doctrine will offer many such coincidences.

The State must be universally present as a moral factor in every branch of its citizens’ activity. It is in fact the all-pervading consciousness that man must have of his citizenship which expresses itself as the government. Obviously extension of territory should be immaterial if the people of a country could actually be lifted to this high state of political realisation.

But even at the stage reached by Fascism it is easy to see how it affects the policy of foreign states towards Italy. Bring the people to such a degree of political consciousness that every activity may be so directed that it ensures at the same time personal and national increase of value, then you can very nearly cease to trouble about foreign policy, which must be the projection of the home policy, that is to be the supreme affair of a government intent on the valorisation of its country.