Signor Mussolini is clearly a believer in government by experts, for most of his Ministers have been chosen for expert qualifications in their several departments; and no choice was a greater inspiration than that of Gentile, the great philosopher and educational reformer, who first carried through the reorganization of the educational system and now gives himself to the more ultimately important task of training the teachers. If some may cavil at the reintroduction of religious instruction, and others cavil at utilitarian aim, Italy to-day is almost unique in reviving the pride of honest craftsmanship and discouraging the production of half-educated babus, fit only for office stools, while giving better scope than ever to the youths of more than average aptitude.

Better known to the outside world is, of course, the restoration of Italy's finances, the recovery and final revalorization of the lira under Count Volpi's immediate charge. If the strain for a time was great, and is not yet over, it seems to have been distributed skillfully between the various classes of the population, so that general grumbling has not focused into the more dangerous condition of sectional grievances. Now, with her foreign war debts most favorably funded, a heavy Treasury deficit turned since 1925 into surpluses, strict economy in the public services, the lira stabilized, prices slowly on the down grade, and production developing, Italy has gained a sound economic base for future advance. For this her greatest impulse comes from her apparent solution of the wasteful friction between capital and labor. Putting the national interest before all sectional interests and individual rights, Fascism is now trying a vast and ambitious scheme of Coordinating and combining private initiative with public regulation. The

capitalist system is recognized on condition that it serves the national interest, and to this end the employers and employed in each industry are to be welded together in corporations or guilds, under a joint council or syndic, with compulsory arbitration in case of disagreement. This corporative organization, in which all workers, professional included, are to be grouped, is ultimately to have political functions, through the formation of a Corporative Chamber, for which only producers will have the suffrage, but at present it is essentially economic. If its detailed establishment is still incomplete, a working arrangement exists, and its most vital purpose has already been long realized, for strikes have ceased for five years, being forbidden, and there is certainly no sign of 'ca' canny' methods being practised.

V

In many other directions Italy is seeking to check the sources of waste and to augment production. The work of industrial welfare has been taken over by the State. Strenuous and organized efforts are being made, by draining the marshes and by a campaign against the mosquito, to stamp out the malaria which debilitates large sections of the population. Equally

scientific and coördinated is the effort to increase the production and quality of the wheat of the wheat new machinery, new seed, new methods, even new roads, are factors in the campaign. Similar measures are being applied to other crops, and as Italy is already so closely cultivated that it is not easy to extend the area, the aim is, by intensive efforts, to increase the yield. The exploitation of the natural resources in water power is progressive and continuous. The effort is not to replace coal, for at present there are technical difficulties

which check this ideal, but, by supplementing and economizing it, to develop a cheaper and greater output of power for industrial purposes.

These manifold campaigns are proclaimed and described in the metaphorical language of strategy and battle. Foreign critics are apt to regard these battles 'for the Lira' and 'for Wheat' as evidence of the essentially militaristic tendencies of Fascism wherein, I think, they reveal the shallowness of their own understanding of psychology compared with that of Mussolini. He is too practical to attempt the suppression of age-old human instincts, and can be trusted to profit by the experience of Imperial Rome, to whom the establishment of universal peace within her borders was a fatal curse, because it closed the safety valve for the virile instincts. Many people talk of the problem and importance of turning these instincts into constructive channels. Mussolini, by one of his shrewdest psychological strokes, seems on the way to solve the problem. And he has done it by investing the prosaic struggles of national life with the glamour that modern war has lost, and with all the romantic trappings of war · even to the war correspondent.

These trappings, moreover, as in an army, are the necessary sugar to coat the severest pill of the new system

discipline, the most stressed note and most recurrent word in Fascist Italy to-day. As this is harder of attainment than any venture that Fascism has essayed, so it is perhaps greater than any concrete achievea miracle, indeed that Fascism has accomplished. This discipline is a combination of two sharply contrasting types which would be curious to anyone not conversant with the conditions which have produced it. On the one hand it resembles what an

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Englishman would characterize as the discipline of Sir John Moore; on the other, that of Frederick the Great. The freely offered and even joyous subordination of self for the good of the cause, combined with a discipline of the reflexes the reflexes-a rigorous repression, not merely of contrary opponents, but of contrary instincts in themselves. It is a commonplace, of course, that under Fascism neither an Opposition nor opposition is tolerated. For those convicted or suspect of it the result is as summary as, and less transient than, in the 'castor oil' days. They may be 'admonished,' which will involve the limitation of their movements and an enforced curfew at 9 P.M., or, if less fortunate, they will be removed to one of the smaller Italian islands, where they will receive ten lire a day for sustenance for sustenance-provided that they work for it.

But if Fascists are drastic with their opponents, holding that the regeneration of a nation must take precedence of the rights of the individual, their self-imposed discipline is equally stern, emphasizing duties rather than rights. And it is my impression that Fascists high and low abstain scrupulously from claiming any privileged exemption from their own strict laws wherein they are in marked contrast with most revolutionary and not a few 'democratic' régimes. 'The same law for all' seems here, for a wonder, translated into fact, and the only relaxation is with foreign visitors. Why, with a people so intelligent, should not the discipline be purely of the Moore pattern? The answer may perhaps best be illustrated by the words of a senior Italian officer, who remarked to me a year or two ago that even he, when receiving an order, had an instinctive impulse to revolt against it

unquestionably been the conscious purpose of Fascism to create this national self-confidence as the essential propulsive force behind the Fascist Revolution in its deepest sense. For, as no revolution has aimed at so complete a rebirth, so none has set before it so hard and long a path. Only selfconfidence confidence in its powers, its mission, and its progress carry it through. But, inevitably, in that very quality lies one of the most formidable dangers. It is a feature of the Fascist Revolution, as in some measure of all revolutions, that the very means on which it depends are the most capable of harm to itself.

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Thus, for example, at the very outset Fascism was established in power largely by the efforts of the young-old veterans of the war, all of whom were ready, and many of whom made a second sacrifice of their blood, to save the land from a worse danger than ever Austria had offered. Many of them were Arditi, most formidable of Italy's fighting men in 1915-1918. And as it was difficult to disentangle motives in those who, in 1914, rallied to Kitchener's summons, so was it with the Black Shirts; patriotism, idealism, love of adventure, love of fightingthey are strangely interwoven in the individual, still more in the mass. Stranger still is the way the worst scalawag in peaceful days so often proves not merely the best fighting man in war, but the noblest in sacrifice. Thus it was with the Black Shirts, in motive and in composition; and thus also it was that the hardest test came after the apparent goal had been reached. No government, far less one which has grasped power in a time of chaos, can afford to cast adrift those who have served it well until they until they serve it ill. But it was this proportion of black sheep among the Black Shirts which, in the early years of

the new era, caused serious functional disorder in the body politic by the moral harm of the actions which they committed, in an excess of enthusiasm as often as through a deficiency of ethics. But if Fascism was to survive as a new order, not merely a violent disruption of the old order, radical remedies were essential. And it is just to recognize that these have been applied within the body of Fascism with a stringency and by a purging, progressive and continuous, such as no other revolutionary régime in history has attempted with its own supporters.

In place of this danger, overconfidence is perhaps the most serious in the years immediately ahead. Internally, its tendency is to lead to efforts to cure social and economic ills more rapidly than the adaptability of the body can safely stand. Externally, self-confidence takes the form of a conviction of Italy's destiny as a Great Power, and overconfidence that of a belief that she is already fully capable of upholding and regaining her rights vis-à-vis other nations.

In my travels I inevitably met more than a few examples of aggressive assertions of Italy's power to enforce respect and a certain amount of bellicose talk. I recall with special amusement one ingenuous young man who, after declaring that one Italian was worth ten of a certain neighboring race of war-proved martial ability, related to me how last spring, at the time of the Riviera frontier incidents, he and a band of fellow spirits were assembled on the frontier for a 'punitive raid,' only to be stopped, much to their chagrin, by their own authorities. It is, of course, such incidents as this, and the knowledge of such an attitude, which cause the tension that is observable not merely behind the French and Jugoslav frontiers, but even in the Swiss Ticino.

Yet if it be essential to an understanding of Italy to understand these symptoms, it would be folly to exaggerate them. For if all the heads of Italy to-day are young, like the shoulders they rest on, they are shrewd, or they would not have created an organization which has already survived so many strains and become more compact in the process. When Signor Mussolini speaks now of needing twenty years to fulfill his task, he means, if I may judge, that he wants not merely time to create his new State, but time to allow a complete new generation to grow up in its environment and atmosphere. He is too shrewd to expose, if he can possibly help it, his work to any severe external storms until not only are the foundations firmly laid, but the roof on. Only by generating a continuous current of self-confidence in the nation, and especially in its youth, can the stupendous purpose of Italian regeneration be effected; but his fingers are firmly on the controls, and never firmer than at present. Risky adventures are not on his horizon. If mishap befell him, I am less sanguine. The system is so far consolidated that others might assume control without discord but also without his unique prestige. And thus perhaps an outward explosion might be a more immediate danger than an internal explosion. Of this I feel reasonably sure: that Signor Mussolini's preservation is the strongest guaranty of the preservation of peace in this generation.

Finally comes the question whether the Fascist system and its discipline, vitally necessary as they are during the rebuilding of Rome, may not ultimately cramp her intellectual growth and the higher fruits of the human spirit and initiative. Critics, even friendly critics, frequently express the fear that in Fascism's pursuit of

concrete ideals, discipline, and material progress, the abstract moral qualities and their value to a nation may be overlooked.

On the other hand, the crop of these was becoming more and more impoverished, and the weeds so thick that the grain was almost lost to sight. If in one generation the habits of hard work, discipline, and honesty can be implanted widespread, cultivated in

the willing and enforced on the unwilling, willing, there is at least a good foundation for the next, its roots embedded in freshly fertilized soil, to yield a harvest both more plentiful and of finer quality than in the past. And that next generation, being more fit to use liberty well, can receive it more fully. It would be rash to prophesy, but the best promise of elasticity of system lies in the fact that both Fascism and the mind of Mussolini are essentially non-static. There are even symptoms which hint that the new Rome, having begun with and been created by Cæsar, may reverse the process of the ancients and evolve toward the Rome of Scipio and the Punic Wars, regaining the rugged strength and civic sense of that era, but in addition refined by two Renaissances.

Whatever the future may bring, it is at least certain that it will be different from the present, for Fascism, responsive to the law of life, is all the time changing its system, and adapting its ideals progressively to the fresh conditions. And the foreign critic, if he is to understand this and avoid the exposure of his own shallowness, must likewise change his spectacles — of electoral institutions and the paramount rights of the individual. Fascism is not merely an effort toward a new political system, but a new way of life. Thus it is the greatest human experiment of our time, perhaps of any time.