THE echoes of the grandiose journey of Signor Mussolini to Tripoli have not yet died down, and already one hears here and there the question, What next? The Duce is never short of new surprises, and the Italian citizen rising from his bed in the morning never knows with what extraordinary spectacle he may be entertained before sunset. The imagination of the man is a truly powerful one, his resources inexhaustible, his energies marvelous. He must be living in a constant atmosphere of excitement. He thinks in, and speaks of, battles the battle of the lira, the battle of the corn, the battle of the silk, the battle of the colonies, and so on. He is never at peace with anybody or anything, not even with himself. Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep; so did the Ancient Mariner; so did Julian the Apostate in Swinburne's glorious lines. But Mussolini's blessings are only for the 'sleepless and perilous' life. He keeps his people in a permanent state of high fever, so that, as things are, one may reasonably expect a collapse should the thermometer descend even one degree. But will it do so? And if so, when and how? These are the questions which naturally occur to the observer who sets himself to study the interesting phenomenon of Fascist Italy; and, unfortunately, they are just the questions most difficult to answer.

Forecasts are always unsafe, especially in politics. In 1857 Emerson wrote

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), May 8

that the child was then not yet living whose grandchildren would see the abolition of slavery in America. He saw it himself six years later. Mussolini predicted that Fascism will last at least sixty years. It may be so. It may not. Fascism has apparently nothing to fear. Its power is overwhelming. It has captured everybody and everything, reduced the monarchy to a phantom, destroyed all political parties, practically abolished Parliament and the press, suppressed the small communes, Fascistized the Army, the Navy, the schools, the judiciary. All is Fascist, even the law, and that is monstrous. There is no longer any organized body in Italy, even nonpolitical and noneconomic, a body, say, cultural, scientific, or social, which has not been branded with the mark of Fascism. You find this mark everywhere on the money you spend, in the tram you ride in, in the office you enter, in the restaurant you dine at, in the music you hear, on the toys that you buy for your children. The very air you breathe must be Fascist. If you are not Fascist you are not Italian, you cannot teach, plead, write, or in any way earn your living. Foolish and incredible as all this must seem, yet it is the simple truth, and one does not wonder, under the circumstances, at the daily boast of Mussolini and his followers that Fascismo is as solid as a rock.

Yet there are rocks in the Alps which, if you put your ear close against them, will let you hear a vague and dim murInvisible waters corroding the

mur.

rocks. And if you put your ear close to this heavy rock suffocating Italian life you may hear in a like way a murmur which, in the long run, may prove as corrosive as the invisible waters of the Alps. Mussolini is never tired of proclaiming, particularly when speaking to foreigners, that he governs not only with force but also with the consent of the people. As a matter of fact, if he really enjoyed the sincere consent of the majority of his people he would have no need of force. The truth, then, must be the opposite that, in spite of that, in spite of appearances, he has not the consent of which he boasts. The reason why he has destroyed every organization is just because he must prevent this widespread, though invisible, spirit of skepticism and distrust having the means of mixing and coagulating.

Take the Church. It is said that Mussolini has notably improved the relations between the Quirinal and the Vatican, and that the Church follows his experiment sympathetically. Now, the only truth in this statement is that the Vatican, quite logically, accepts from Fascism all that it offers, without coming to any compromise. Mussolini has reintroduced the crucifix in the schools, has encouraged religious teaching, and has himself given evidence of devotion to the Church. The Vatican is pleased with all this, but what has it given in return? Nothing. It is always Mussolini who is courting the Vatican, and not the Vatican Mussolini. The Vatican pursues, as always, an intelligent and long-sighted policy. It has its man in the Cabinet - Signor Federzoni, Minister of the Interior. Signor Federzoni comes from the Nationalist, not the Fascist, ranks. He is a cultured man, very able, a subtle diplomat of the old school, and a devout Catholic who attends Mass every morning before reaching his Ministry. He is dear to the Jesuits, and to the Vatican.

But Federzoni is suspected by the Fascists because, as Minister of the Interior, he wants the Prefects to obey him and not the Rasses, as the Fascist chieftains in the provinces are called. This was the reason of his long feud with Farinacci, the firebrand late general secretary of the Fascist Party. But when the moment came to make a choice, choice, Mussolini had to sacrifice Farinacci and keep Federzoni, because, although it is said that personally the Premier has no particular weakness for his Minister of the Interior, Federzoni is the long arm of the Vatican.

It is said that the Pope, coming from an ultraconservative Lombard family, has a certain liking for the present régime. This is quite possible. But his Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, is notoriously anti-Fascist, and as such has been repeatedly attacked in certain Fascist papers. In the College of Cardinals there are dignitaries of the Church, like Cardinal Maffi of Pisa, who know what Fascism really is, and who have seen with their own eyes some of its doings. Besides, the great majority of the priests in the cities and in the country, particularly in the North, are hostile. The Catholics in the countryside have suffered at the hands of the Fascists, just as much as the Socialists. Don Minzoni, the murdered curate of Argenta, is to the Catholics what Matteotti is to the Socialists. Nor has anybody forgotten the devastation of the Catholic clubs and coöperatives in the North, after the elections of April 1924, when the Catholic districts were punished for not having voted for the Fascist list.

Again, take the workmen and peasants. Nobody thinks that they have spontaneously abandoned their Red or White leagues in order to enter the Fascist corporations. Nobody can believe that they keep within them loyally. The truth is that both work

men and peasants have for two years been terrorized, and that they now keep quiet, and are apparently satisfied, only because their economic conditions are not bad. The industrialists, agrarians, and financiers are, naturally, the classes more sincerely favorable to the régime, but not all of them are blind to what will probably be its ultimate consequences, and many would have preferred that Mussolini, even while ruling with a strong hand and protecting the interests of production, should have respected the Constitution and not overstepped certain limits.

The resistance to Fascism, be it but a passive one, is widespread above all among the intellectual and professional classes. Here too it is easy to be deceived by appearances. Take the schools: professors must give the Roman salute, must exalt before their pupils the glories and hopes of Fascism, must pledge themselves faithfully to serve. the régime. Yet among the professors those who are sincerely Fascist form but a small minority. Recently the professors of philosophy held a congress in Milan, and there they held a theoretical discussion of free thought. The conference was immediately broken up by order of the Prefect because only three professors were found to oppose to the theory of free thought that of Fascism. Take the press. All the newspapers are Fascist, but they interpret public opinion to such a small extent that nobody reads them. Their circulation is steadily decreasing. The consumption of Italian home-made newsprint that is, papers has fallen off some two hundred tons a month. As there are no longer any Opposition papers, many buy foreign journals, whose sale in Italy has never been so large. This is especially true of the French papers. As to journalists, the fact is worth mentioning that at their National Congress, held in Palermo at

the end of 1924, a resolution for the freedom of the press was passed with acclamation, there being only two opposers. The lawyers, again, in their Congresses in Turin and Trieste, passed votes in support of the independence of the judiciary, showing that the majority of them are far from disposed to accept the Fascist conception of justice. The regular army was certainly not Fascist up to two years ago, when it looked upon the irregular army of the Black Shirts as a rival. But since Mussolini has taken up also the portfolio of War, and has become War Minister, and, above all, since he has increased the allowances of the officers, things have changed. At least there is now more discretion displayed in the officers'

Discretion, prudence, reserve, silence, simulation, dissimulation - these are the chief virtues of the régime, and their effect may, indeed, be such as to justify the legend that the whole population of Italy is heart and soul with Fascism. The truth is that many thousands of ex-service men who, after the war, found themselves faced with the necessity of keeping body and soul together threw themselves into Fascism just as they would have thrown themselves into Bolshevism provided their immediate daily needs were satisfied. The truth is that Fascism has logically the support, in some cases with certain reservations, of the capitalist classes; that its ranks have been swollen by the syndicalists and other extremists who left the Social Reformist Party in 1915 and followed Mussolini in his militarist and nationalist evolution; and that there is, last but not least, a sort of general embellissement, due to a vain and exasperated nationalism. But, as I said before, it would be a mistake to judge the phenomenon from its surface appearances and to believe that Fascism has the spontaneous, and

therefore reliable, support of the great majority of the Italian population.

Fascism is to a great extent made up of many of these legends, which only time will gradually dispel. The legend that Fascism was responsible for the wave of economic prosperity has already been shaken. Fascism indeed had only a very small share in determining the favorable conditions created for Italian commercial expansion. When Mussolini assumed power in October 1922 the so-called Bolshevist crisis had already been overcome. The strike mania had passed, so that the last political strike foolishly ordered by the Socialists in the summer of that year had ended in a great fiasco. Order was being reëstablished everywhere. The statesmen and journalists of every country who passed one or two months in Genoa in the spring of 1922 for the famous international conference will remember that all the Italian public services were then working regularly, and that Italy, even without the Fascist Government, was reassuming its normal life. The Fascists seized power in October 1922, and since then, preventing strikes by force, and obliging the workmen and peasants to work on conditions favorable to the masters and agrarians, have undoubtedly helped to favor productive energies. This is the only contribution that may be credited to them, and even this would have been of doubtful effect if other and more real causes of economic prosperity had not been in operation.

Italian industry, having been protected by heavy customs tariffs so that it could exploit the home market at the expense of the national consumer, has notably developed its export trade during the last three years because, firstly, of the depreciation of the lira which allowed foreigners to buy in Italy cheaper than in other countries, and, secondly, the low wages of the

Italian workmen which permitted Italian manufacturers to produce at a cost lower than that of other countries. But now that these causes have partly, or wholly, ceased to exist or operate we see that Italian industry, in spite of Fascism, has entered a crisis which is becoming more and more serious every day. A communiqué of an official agency recently gave the disquieting news that there had been a notable falling-off in the export trade during the first three months of this year, in comparison with the corresponding three months of 1925, that the silk, cotton, and woolen industries were particularly depressed, and that very serious difficulties were being encountered by the metallurgical, mechanical, and chemical industries. The reasons given for the crisis by the official agency were, firstly, that, owing to the French franc and the Belgian franc having depreciated more than the lira, those who yesterday bought in Italy now find it more convenient to buy in France and Belgium; secondly, that, in order to meet this competition, the Italian manufacturers would have to lower the cost of production, but this they could not do because the wages of the Italian workmen are already so low that further reduction is impossible; thirdly, that the Germans are again showing their activity on the world's markets; fourthly, that almost everywhere high tariff barriers, which obstruct Italian commercial expansion, have been erected.

During the last three or four years, moreover, the Italian industrialists, imagining that they were about to conquer the world, tied up enormous sums of money several billion lire every year in new plants, machinery, and other expenses. The capitals of the various undertakings have been thus continually increased, and Italian industry has now swollen like the frog

in the fable of Æsop. The consequences of all this are now beginning to be seen. The situation is finally aggravated by the cost of living, which is becoming higher and higher, having risen from 493 per cent of the 1913 level in 1923 to 650 per cent this year; by the heavy taxation - sixteen per cent income tax; and by the increase in public expenditure. The internal public debt has risen from ninety-one billion in June 1925 to 92.7 billion in February 1926. The note circulation has risen from 196 billion in 1923 to 214 billion at the end of 1925. The purchasing power of the lira has gone down from twenty-five centesimi in 1924 to twenty centesimi. The Fascist Government, which in the first three years

had made economies, has lately been spending lavishly, and now a great many schemes are on foot for improving and embellishing the cities, for making Rome as imposing as it was at the time of Augustus, for public works, and so on. Where will the money come from? Professor Giorgio Mortara, in his publication, Economic Prospects for 1926, clearly says that 'one must not rely too much on the development of the income of the State.' What is important is economy. 'We have reached a point where it seems urgent to stop all this increase in public expenditure.' In short, the legend that Fascism has created great prosperity in the country is now being destroyed by the facts.