sceptical of all
high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical,
cold, hard-headed, practical--what Mazzini would have called a "shrewd
materialist." In the persons, indeed, of Mazzini and Giolitti, we may
find a picture of the two aspects of pre-war Italy, of that
irreconcilable duality which paralyzed the vitality of the country and
which the Great War was to solve.

V

The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite
sense--to mark the beginning of a general _debacle_ of the Italian
State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State. If
entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over
materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample
justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter. After
the Armistice our Allies turned their backs upon us. Our victory
assumed all the aspects of a defeat. A defeatist psychology, as they
say, took possession of the Italian people and expressed itself in
hatred of the war, of those responsible for the war, even of our army
which had won our war. An anarchical spirit of dissolution rose
against all authority. The ganglia of our economic life seemed struck
with mortal disease. Labor ran riot in strike after strike. The very
bureaucracy seemed to align itself against the State. The measure of
our spiritual dispersion was the return to power of Giolitti--the
execrated Neutralist--who for five years had been held up as the
exponent of an Italy which had died with the war.

But, curiously enough, it was under Giolitti that things suddenly
changed in aspect, that against the Giolittian State a new State
arose. Our soldiers, our genuine soldiers, men who had willed our war
and fought it in full consciousness of what they were doing, had the
good fortune to find as their leaders a man who could express in words
things that were in all their hearts and who could make those words
audible above the tumult.

Mussolini had left Italian socialism in 1915 in order to be a more
faithful interpreter of "the Italian People" (the name he chose for
his new paper). He was one of those who saw the necessity of our war,
one of those mainly responsible for our entering the war. Already as a
socialist he had fought Freemasonry; and, drawing his inspiration from
Sorel's syndicalism, he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of
Reformist Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution and
violence. Then, later, on