leaving the party and in defending the cause
of intervention, he had come to oppose the illusory fancies of
proletarian internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible
integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of the national
organism, affirming therefore the sanctity of country for the working
classes as for other classes. Mussolini was a Mazzinian of that
pure-blooded breed which Mazzini seemed somehow always to find in the
province of Romagna. First by instinct, later by reflection, Mussolini
had come to despise the futility of the socialists who kept preaching
a revolution which they had neither the power nor the will to bring to
pass even under the most favorable circumstances. More keenly than
anyone else he had come to feel the necessity of a State which would
be a State, of a law which would be respected as law, of an authority
capable of exacting obedience but at the same time able to give
indisputable evidence of its worthiness so to act. It seemed
incredible to Mussolini that a country capable of fighting and winning
such a war as Italy had fought and won should be thrown into disorder
and held at the mercy of a handful of faithless politicians.

When Mussolini founded his Fasci in Milan in March, 1919, the movement
toward dissolution and negation that featured the post-war period in
Italy had virtually ceased. The Fasci made their appeal to Italians
who, in spite of the disappointments of the peace, continued to
believe in the war, and who, in order to validate the victory which
was the proof of the war's value, were bent on recovering for Italy
that control over her own destinies which could come only through a
restoration of discipline and a reorganization of social and political
forces. From the first, the Fascist Party was not one of believers but
of action. What it needed was not a platform of principles, but an
idea which would indicate a goal and a road by which the goal could be
reached.

The four years between 1919 and 1923 inclusive were characterized by
the development of the Fascist revolution through the action of "the
squads." The Fascist "squads" were really the force of a State not yet
born but on the way to being. In its first period, Fascist "squadrism"
transgressed the law of the old regime because it was determined to
suppress that regime as incompatible with the national State to which
Fascism was aspiring. The March on Rome was not the beginning, it was
the end of that pha