expression in eloquent language to the Nationalist sentiment which was beginning to be felt in many sections of public opinion. Corradini, together with Luigi Federzoni (then a struggling journalist, to-day Minister of the Interior), Maraviglia, ForgesDavanzati, and other young men of high character, deep enthusiasm and remarkable intellectual attainments, created the Nationalist movement, soon to develop into a political party. It secured a few seats in Parliament and attracted much sympathy among many who did not call themselves Nationalists, but approved of its ideals. Nationalism undoubtedly prepared the way for the Libyan War, which taught the nation that the old fighting spirit had revived, and proved the dress rehearsal of Italy's intervention in the World War.

The necessity for that intervention was by no means realized by the whole population. Indeed, intervention was actively opposed not only by the Socialists, who rejected all war except class war, but also by Italians who, for business or other reasons, were attached to Germany, by the supporters of the Triple Alliance, by many of the Catholics who feared Orthodox Russia, disliked" atheistic" France, and pinned their faith on Clerical Austria, and by those who in general feared the effects of the war on Italy and honestly believed in the advantages of neutrality. The Interventionists comprised the Irredentists, Nationalists, a part of the Francophil Democrats, and in general those who were convinced that Italy could not stand aside from the great struggle without forfeiting her position as a great Power. The Neutralists were strongest in Parliament, the Interventionists in the country. The latter prevailed, but even after war had been declared there were still influential neutralist and defeatist groups, ever on the look out for openings for a separate peace, while the Socialists carried out a systematic sabotage against the war and sometimes acted as agents of the enemy. The country thus continued to be divided, and the soldiers at the front were being morally stabbed in the back. It was the Caporetto disaster which welded the nation together in a grim determination to fight to the bitter end.

When the war ended the whole nation was filled with the victory feeling; for the first time in its history the Italian people had won an overwhelming military triumph, and its hereditary enemy was not merely crushed, but wiped off the face of the map. The Italian national spirit was forged at Vittorio Veneto. But

Jan. hardly had the echoes of General Diaz's victory bulletin died down when the exasperating disappointments of the Peace Conference, the grave post-war economic difficulties, and the general exhaustion caused by the terrible sacrifices undergone by the people, resulted in widespread discouragement and discontent. The sacrifices had been proportionately heavier for Italy than for other richer countries with older national traditions. Professor Gentile tells how several of his young friends, collaborators and readers of his review, Nuova politica liberale, on returning from the war, where they had done their duty gallantly, expected to find their country raised and purified by the victory, whereas

They found nothing but disappointment and disillusion: the people exhausted and ready for any mean action, provided they could secure a life of enjoyment, the very combatants thinking only of obtaining rewards for the duty performed and thereby squandering its moral value and beauty, all ideas obscured, all faith giving way to egoism which was all the more violent because it had been so long repressed.*

The Socialists and Communists, who had largely lost their hold over the masses during the war, took advantage of the general depression to re-establish it, by making fantastic promises to the people. They found encouragement in the example of Russia, and were helped by the ex-neutralists and politicians who had never believed in victory and were almost annoyed that it had come. The successive post-war Governments, although comprising men of eminence and sincere patriotism, had no other conception of policy than that of following the line of least resistance and of giving way to the demands of the most violent, in the vain hope of killing sedition by kindness. The post-war problems were beyond the capacity of the pre-war politicians. Many of them actually believed that the triumph of Bolshevism was inevitable, and were prepared to come to terms with the revolutionary leaders. The Reds fomented strikes and disorders and even tried to promote famine by holding up production, in the hope of completely destroying the bourgeois monarchy and erecting a Soviet Republic in its place. At the very moment when all the resources and energy of the country were needed to make good the vast losses of the war, every form of activity was systematically paralysed, every attempt at reconstruction handi

*" Che cosa è il Fascismo," p. 173.

capped, and while economy was imperative for financial restoration, the demagogues constantly made extravagant demands on the Exchequer which the Government was too feeble or too pusillanimous to refuse. The result was the piling up of huge deficits, while the over-staffed public services were in a state of chaos. Insubordination was the rule. The railway service was conducted at the good pleasure of the railway-men; the workers seized factories which they were unable to run, although they succeeded in causing deadly injury to industry. The Catholics, who were organized as a party (the Partito popolare) at the beginning of 1919, attempted to stem the current towards Bolshevism, with a somewhat more reasonable social and political programme, but their leader, Don Luigi Sturzo, in order to take the wind out of the sails of the Socialists, adopted an attitude little less seditious than theirs, and the strikes and disorders promoted by the Popolari were on the most approved Bolshevik lines.

What deeply exasperated all who had any patriotic feeling was the treatment of the men who had fought in the war and won it in spite of the politicians and sedition-mongers. Officers and men decorated for valour or with wound badges were hunted down like criminals, and often murdered in the streets with impunity, while the Government refused to protect them and, indeed, showed every desire to humiliate them in order to curry favour with the all-powerful Reds. The crowning outrage was the amnesty granted by Nitti to the deserters. The body politic seemed sick unto death, and the nation in a state of senile decay.

It is in moments such as these that the recuperative force of the Italian people is apt to show itself at its best and to save the country on the very brink of irretrievable disaster. The Nationalists still existed, but they were too few-many of them had fallen in the war-and had too little hold on the masses to counteract the propaganda and promises of the Reds and of the Popolari. But another movement now arose, which adopted Nationalist ideals, while giving them a wider scope and a more popular application. Fascism was primarily a reaction against the anti-national attitude of the Socialists and Communists, aided and abetted by the ex-neutralists, and in favour of a revival of the spirit which had won the war. Its original programme contained demagogic features and not a little rhetoric; but fundamentally the movement was sound and patriotic, and appealed to the best

VOL. 245. NO. 499.

E

instincts of the people. It was this re-awakening of national feeling which gave Fascism its hold on the Italians. While it encountered many opponents, some of them men of high character and genuine patriotism, who disapproved of its revolutionary spirit and its tendency to violent action, its supporters were filled with an enthusiasm such as no other movement had commanded since the days of the Risorgimento.

Professor Gentile answers the question as to how a doctrine has thus become "passion and action" by stating that Fascism is born of the war. Personally I think its origins are older, and are the outcome of Nationalism. But the war certainly generalised the national feeling which made Fascism possible. Never before had so large a proportion of the people found itself engaged in a vast conflict, directly or indirectly involving the whole nation and its future destinies. Rich and poor, gentle and simple, town dweller and rustic, all were drawn into the vortex. The Sardinian and the Sicilian fought as doggedly as the native of the provinces immediately threatened by the enemy, where the memory of Austrian oppression was still living. All felt that they were making sacrifices for the common cause of Italy's nationhood. There were, however, two significant exceptions, which must be borne in mind in view of the subsequent developments and actions of Fascism. The highly-paid munition workers, among whom Communist and Socialist ideas were most rife, and who were the first to promote sedition, had been spared the ordeal of the war. The Chamber of Deputies had furnished only a small contingent to the fighting forces, and one alone of its members, the gallant Brando Brandolin, had fallen in action.

At first Fascism was merely the expression of feeling of an élite. The members of Mussolini's first Fascio, founded in Milan on March 23, 1919, were barely 150. But when once the movement had started, promising a renaissance of the national spirit and a reaction against the scepticism of the ruling classes and the anti-national spirit of sedition, it soon attracted to itself masses of ex-service men, as well as many others who had been too old to fight, and numbers of youths who had been too young to shoulder a rifle, but who were all filled with profound feeling for their country and were stung to the quick at seeing it thus struck down in the dust. As Professor Gioacchino Volpe says, men of all origins and parties supported the movement-" Monarchists and

Republicans, ex-Socialists and Syndicalists, Anarchists and Futurists; but ever more homogeneous and welded as it were in a single mould through the action of a few energetic men emerging from among them, above all of Benito Mussolini, a ' demagogue' in the good sense of the word."*

Professor Volpe compares this movement with what happened in Italy between 1849 and 1859, when around Piedmont and Cavour and King Victor Emmanuel there gathered men coming from different parts of Italy," the derelicts of many shipwrecks,' men of various origins, temper and moral stature, but united in the sense of a common danger. What attracted to Fascism the sympathy and admiration of many who had not actually joined the movement was the extreme gallantry of these bands of youths, many of them boys barely in their 'teens, who cared not two straws if the odds against them were ten to one, their opponents being often the most dangerous criminals, and were ever ready to face the knife or the bullet of the assassin lying in ambush behind a stone-wall or closed shutters. Many of them, alas, fell victims to their patriotism and sense of duty, and it is not to be wondered at if their comrades, maddened at the sight of their bleeding and often mutilated corpses, sometimes effected ruthless reprisals. The Fascists in fact, acting on the principle of vim vi repellere, were doing the work which the Government should have done, but dared not do.

The Fasci spread rapidly all over the country, especially in those areas where the Reds had been strongest and most truculent. With the successful onslaught of the Fascists against the Red organizations in the Po Valley in 1920-21, large numbers of workmen began to join the movement, thereby imparting a new mass character to it. Nationalism had never appealed to the worker on the farm or in the factory; it was too aristocratic (in the intellectual sense) to arouse their interest, being largely the expression of a literary and philosophical movement. Fascism, although it borrowed many of the ideas from Nationalism, and eventually absorbed it,† was of a broader character. Its leader, Mussolini, had risen from the Syndicalist ranks and had never forgotten his origins. Following this large addition of workmen

*"Fra Storia e Politica," p. 395.

†The two parties were definitely welded into one after the advent to power of Mussolini.