public opinion, and when each side has "shown its hand," demonstrated its power, the weaker side submits. There may have been, meanwhile, no change in the Government at all, especially if the bureaucracy of officeholders has been prudent enough to keep neutral in the struggle.

The comitium, the vox populi, the "assembly of the people," is still the fundamental, the instinctive, political institution of the Italian race. Just as in the old days, at the sound of the tocsin, the populace rushed out to the public square to determine policy in great crises, so, with due reserves, it does to-day.

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The first Fascista organizations sprang up in Triest in the late winter and spring of 1919. The territories conquered in the war from Austria and still awaiting disposition from the peace conference in Paris were a chaos of conflicting propagandas. The Jugoslav population, in its three mutually discordant branches, the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, were staging anti-Italian demonstrations. From Italy came an agitation of two kinds, that from the Socialists, who were counting on the disorganization of the devastated regions to find allies for the coming revolution; and that from the Nationalists, determined to realize the extreme program of the Italian imperialists, which involved the annexation of Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, and southern Albania.

Throughout Istria and Julian Venetia the more ardent Italian patriots, under the protection of an army of occupation, disgruntled and demoralized by delayed demobilization, united to intimidate their foes of different

colors. There were clashes with the Jugoslavs; there were clashes with the Socialists. To the occupied regions flocked the most adventurous spirits of Italy, arditi,—the shock-troops of the army, selected for their daredevil courage, decorated heroes, much set up by the publicity they had been enjoying and loathe to return to the humdrum labors of peace; demobilized officers and soldiers who had not as yet been able to find employment in civil life.

Read the speech that D'Annunzio made to his comrades on his squadron of airplanes-the famous Serenissima

-in proposing an Italian trip by air to Tokio. It was a gloomy, drizzling day in camp a camp of peace-times, with no hope of combat on the morrow. The atmosphere of depression and irritated boredom appalled. For four years Italian heroes had been pouring out their blood in defense of a great cause. Life had been thrilling, inspiring, intoxicating. Suddenly, with peace, it had lost meaning. Colorless and mournful the future stretched out before men who had known existence in its most tremendous manifestations of effort and action. The flight to Tokio appealed to the poet as a semblance of another great adventure. It was not to Tokio, however, that D'Annunzio and his comrades went. They went to Fiume, and the raid on Fiume, the achievement of a handful of patriotic enthusiasts, brought to the war-strained nerves of a few thousand restless men the excitement they were craving.

The Fiume episode was the great expression of the Fascista spirit in the first phase of the movement; it was also the most dangerous to the Italian monarchy: for the adventurers chose

an issue on which they could count on virtually unanimous support from the great amorphous Italian public. The Government could do nothing but wear the morale of the raiders out by a policy of strict inaction.

An observation is in point here. The theory of "direct action," though of syndicalist origin, has been part and parcel of Italian Nationalist doctrine from the beginnings of that party, just before the Italo-Turkish War. According to that theory, of which a brillant exposition was made by the Frenchman Sorel fifteen years ago, and in the interests of the proletarian revolution, the course of history is determined not by the stolid, unthinking, comfortable majority of citizens, all engrossed in their daily concerns of business and pleasure, but by the selfconscious minority, which knows what it wants, and at the strategic moment imposes its will, by violence if need be.

§ 3

The writers of our "New Nationalism" perceived the utility of that doctrine for the purposes of the middle classes as well as of the proletariat. Our old Nationalist locals of 1914, for instance, met the Socialists on their own ground, exchanging blow for blow.

Present-day fascismo is, in this respect, only a continuation, on a larger scale, of this earlier Nationalism. The Fiume episode illustrates the direct action of a minority on a legally constituted majority (the government of Mr. Nitti). At a time when the Nationalists had virtually paralyzed the ministry in Rome they had one representative in a Parliament of 509!

Here the paramount issue was the country's foreign policy. In the second phase of fascismo, where the prov

inces of Emilia and Romagna, and no longer the reconquered territories, were principally involved, the point in question was domestic policySocialism.

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In this, the more striking of its manifestations, the Fascista movement presents an interesting paradox. The originators and leaders of fascismo were not, as might be supposed and as is often stated, men from the reactionary middle classes, but ex-Socialists, often of the most revolutionary type; ex-anarchists, even.

Umberto Pasella, General Secretary of the Fascisti, writes:

The first legend I must refute is that we constitute a sort of "White Guard" in the service of conservatives, reactionaries, and profiteers. We have, as a movement, nothing to do with the empty formulæ, the vacuous platforms of the past. Our leaders belong to the advanced posts of progressivism. They are all anxious for reform, change, improvement in public life. Benito Mussolini, the founder of our organization, is an ex-Socialist (revolutionary). On our executive council in Milan are Enrico Besana, a former comrade of the archSocialist Costantino Lazzari; Cesare Rossi, a Syndicalist; Leandro Arpinati, an ex-anarchist; . . . Amedeo Buttafava, a revolutionary workingman from Sampierdarena. On our committee, in fact, we have only one man of thorough Nationalistic extractionPiero Marsich, of Venice. So much for our "General Staff." As for the rank and file, I may say that in all Italy we have scarcely five hundred members living on incomes. Our followers are for the most part boys of very moderate means, students, professional men, returned soldiers, heroes who have come back from the front animated by unself

...

ish ideals and burning with noble enthusiasm the will to purify Italian public life and restore the moral fiber of the Italian nation.

Nationalism, in the sense of a burning love of country, is, for that matter, characteristic of certain elements in the otherwise radical parties of Italy. Alceste de Ambris, for instance, exiled only a few years since for establishing an abortive syndicalistic republic in Parma, was vice-regent of Fiume under D'Annunzio. The Italian Seamen's Union, of which the picturesque Giulietti is chief, is an organization of patriotic communists, who on the one hand kept the patriots of Fiume well provisioned from the sea, and on the other repatriated Errico Malatesta, the anarchist leader, from England. And just as we have Nationalistic radicals, so we have radical Nationalists. The first seizure of a factory in Italy was made not by socialists or communists, but by some very conservative working-men, veterans of the war, in the province of Bergamo.

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Though we speak of its "leaders," its "councils," its "committees," we must not infer that the Fascisti have a responsible organization, with headquarters and an address. Fascismo is a vague, a formless movement; it is a state of mind, a spontaneous understanding, rather, of certain elements in the Italian population. It is almost a matter of temperament. We look in vain for a coherent body of political opinion among the Fascisti. Some are republicans, but others profess devotion to the monarchy. Some, as we have seen, are socialists, anarchists, while others are extreme conservatives. That is why we get closer to the spirit

of the Fascisti by studying men rather than ideas or political theories.

I select one, a personal acquaintance of mine, who illustrates in his biography the type predominant among the moving spirits of the Fascisti. He is Ferdinando Agnoletti, leader of the Fascisti in Florence.

Agnoletti is fifty years old, a graduate in letters of the Florentine Studio, and trained for the teaching profession. He has never been able, however, to settle down to any kind of life that smacks of monotony. In 1894, for instance, he threw aside his books and, following one of the traditions of Italian democracy, volunteered with the Garibaldi filibusters to take sides with the Greeks in the war against Turkey. He was present at the battle of Domokos. Returning to Italy, he took his degree in letters, and then went to England, becoming lecturer in Italian literature at the University of Edinburgh. In the Scottish capital he organized a coöperative union among the Italian ice-cream venders and hurdy-gurdy men, and even edited a journal called the "Clarion Call to Latinity." When I first met Agnoletti in Florence, he had become a dairy farmer, with the idea of furnishing "grade A" milk in competition with the "adulterated" article commonly supplied by the "milk trust." He went into insolvency in due time. I next found him as a theatrical producer, and then, later still, as an antiquarian and second-hand bookdealer.

When I founded the magazine called "La Voce," to furnish an organ for the modernist movement in Italian letters, Agnoletti blossomed out as a Futurist, and wrote a number of articles for me. They had some success. Then the

war broke out. Agnoletti was on the inside track in all the "interventionist" intrigues. He became the author of a popular song, writing the music himself, which the boys of Florence used to sing about the streets while shouting for war against Germany. When Italy went in at last, Agnoletti joined the Alpini, and later was an officer in the artillery. Since the armistice he has been in the forefront of every imperialistic and patriotic demonstration. He has been proDalmatia, pro-Fiume, pro-D'Annunzio, anti-Socialist. He is now a free mason (which in Italy means antiClerical), and has taken up his antiquarian work again, collecting expensive masterpieces and books.

Mussolini himself, the reputed leader of the Fascisti, has not had a regular or placid life. Born in Romagna, the "reddest" region in "red" Italy, in 1884, Mussolini was for many years a revolutionary Socialist, and was, in fact, sent into exile with the famous Socialist leader Giacinto MenottiSerrati. In Trent, which was then an Austrian city, he joined Cesare Battisti, the Nathan Hale of Italy in the Great War. At this time Battisti was a Socialist deputy in Vienna, where he acted as leader of the Tretine irredentists. Mussolini worked on Battisti's paper, "Il Popolo," till he was expelled from Austria.

Returning to Italy, he rose to the front rank of Italian Socialists, was strong enough to exclude the moderate reformists, Bissolati and Bonomi, from the Socialist party in 1913, and in 1914, as editor of "Avanti," was prominent in swinging Socialist support to the famous "Red Week" of the anarchists of Ancona. In August of that year he came out violently in

favor of Italian intervention in the war against Germany, failed to carry his party with him, and then became one of the bitterest assailants of anti-war socialism and all opposed to a complete victory of the Allies. During the war Mussolini founded the patriotic daily called "Il Popolo d'Italia," which is now the official organ of the Fascisti.

Mussolini's change from extreme radicalism to violent nationalism-he was the leader in breaking up Bissolati's pro-Wilson meeting at Milan in 1919-has led enemies to challenge the sincerity of his manifold political activities. His open intimacy of recent date with rich manufacturers in Milan and Turin furnishes the basis for gossip. However, Italian Nationalism is frankly opportunistic, reserving the right to reverse positions overnight if Italy is the gainer thereby. Mussolini's career has thus an internal consistency of its own-hostility to everybody and everything not consonant with an aggressive Italian chauvinism.

Restlessness, the spirit of adventure, impatience with routine, intemperance of thought and action, thirst for excitement, passion for publicity in connection with noble emprise these are traits prominent in many of the outstanding figures in Italian fascismo.

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In defying the Government so long at Fiume the Fascisti were supported by public opinion, outraged by the treatment of Italy at Versailles. In their war on the Socialists they were supported by all the elements in the country not directly involved in the struggle between capital and labor.

It was not the seizure of the factories by working-men in September of last

year that so much irritated the noncombatant public. Premier Giolitti, in refusing to suppress the revolutionists, could count on the approval of a growing number of Italian citizens who are as much disgusted with profiteering as they are with strikes, and who are willing to find a solution of the class struggle in some form of coöperative management of industry. The complaint of the public against the Socialists rested on other, more intimate grounds.

In the year 1919 and the early months of 1920 Italian laborers were in an ugly frame of mind. On any or no pretext strikes were called with or without notice. Public service of all kinds was suspended from moment to moment. Mails, telephones, and telegraphs were interrupted by strikes lasting from an hour to three days at a time. Street-cars would stop running because a conductor had quarreled with a passenger. Express-trains would refuse to start because a soldier was aboard, or because a package of arms had been reported in a baggagecar. The electric lights would be turned off because a foreman had refused to apologize to a workman.

In the two provinces of Emilia and Romagna, where the masses inhabiting the great plains of the Po are solidly Socialist, a veritable "dictatorship of the proletariat" had been organized even before the war; after the armistice it became openly menacing. The practice of boycott had begun to weigh heavily upon all kinds of individual activity. Landowners, their agents, and their superintendents were put under the Socialist ban, and any one having dealings with them except on the conditions laid down by the Socialist leagues was exposed to

endless reprisals. A boycotted person cannot continue living in his home town. The baker will not sell him bread, the cobbler will not mend his shoes, the barber will not cut his hair, and even the doctor, if he is a Socialist, will refuse to visit him when he is sick. There have been cases where a boycotted family has had to bury its own dead, because undertaker and gravedigger belonged to the "Proletarian League."

This boycott assumed the proportions less of a punitive system of terror than of an actual system of proletarian fiscal administration by blackmail. Boycotts were adjusted to the gravity of the offenses chargeable to the victim, but especially to his financial means. They could be lifted in some cases by joining the league, more often by the payment of fines or assessments. The reports of the Proprietors' Association, of the Parliamentary Commission of Investigation, and of the Bishop of Bologna show that the boycott worked with all the efficacy of the ecclesiastical excommunication of the Middle Ages.

In some districts the boycott was applied with great rigor to the church. Some Socialist communes laid a heavy income tax on church property. Then, again, an individual priest would be "outlawed" for having mown his hay on a field under the ban or for having employed a laborer who was "in bad" with the Socialist leagues. Violence was occasionally used to prevent the priest from celebrating mass, from preaching, or even from using the streets to get to his church.

For two years the bourgeoisie submitted to these conditions, contenting itself with criticizing the Government through the newspapers for not safe