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.
* * * * *
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.