s and hardships of the humblest classes are alleviated. But
here Fascism repudiates the concept of an economic "happiness" which
is to be--at a given moment in the evolution of economy--socialistically
and almost automatically realised by assuring to all the maximum of
well-being.

Fascism denies the possibilities of the materialistic concept of
"happiness"--it leaves that to the economists of the first half
of the Seventeenth Century; that is, it denies the equation
"well-being-happiness," which reduces man to the state of the animals,
mindful of only one thing--that of being fed and fattened; reduced, in
fact, to a pure and simple vegetative existence.

6. Against Democratic Ideologies.

After disposing of Socialism, Fascism opens a breach on the whole
complex of the democratic ideologies, and repudiates them in their
theoretic premises as well as in their practical application or
instrumentation. Fascism denies that numbers, by the mere fact of
being numbers, can direct human society; it denies that these numbers
can govern by means of periodical consultations; it affirms also the
fertilising, beneficient and unassailable inequality of men, who
cannot be levelled through an extrinsic and mechanical process such as
universal suffrage.

Regimes can be called democratic which, from time to time, give the
people the illusion of being sovereign, whereas the real and effective
sovereignty exists in other, and very often secret and irresponsible
forces.

Democracy is a regime without a king, but very often with many kings,
far more exclusive, tyrannical and ruinous than a single king, even if
he be a tyrant. This explains why Fascism which, for contingent
reasons, had assumed a republican tendency before 1922, renounced it
previous to the March on Rome, with the conviction that the political
constitution of a State is not nowadays a supreme question; and that,
if the examples of past and present monarchies and past and present
republics are studied, the result is that neither monarchies nor
republics are to be judged under the assumption of eternity, but that
they merely represent forms in which the extrinsic political evolution
takes shape as well as the history, the tradition and the psychology
of a given country.

Consequently, Fascism glides over the antithesis between monarchy and
republic, on which democraticism wasted time, blaming the former for
all social shortcomings and exalting the latter as a regime o