"The parliamentary session has just closed with a series of dramatic surprises. Signor Mussolini has given the country plenty to think about during the holidays. During the last few sittings of the Chamber three important laws were passed in rapid succession, regulating respectively the position of the bureaucracy, the activities of the press, and the power of the Government to legislate by the use of royal decrees."
Without entering into details, it may be said that the general effect of these measures will be to strengthen the position of the executive and render it difficult if not impossible, for either Parliament, press, or civil servants to offer opposition to, or criticism of, its methods.
Lest the full import of this victory should be lost on the country, the Prime Minister closed the Fascist Congress last Monday with one of the most remarkable speeches he has ever made. It is an absolutely clear statement of his deliberate intention to create a Fascist state, a state in which Fascism will not be a part of the nation but the nation itself, so that the words Italian and Fascist shall come to be synonymous, just as are practically the words Italian and Catholic. As a preliminary, he announces that parliamentarism has been conquered. The laws that have been passed so far are for the defense of Fascism; those that will be put before the country in the autumn will carry on the work in a constructive and creative sense.
A REAL FASCIST STATE
That these intentions are the logical outcome of Signor Mussolini’s policy for the last three years no one can doubt who has made any consecutive study of his acts, which are invariably plain, and of his public utterances, which have never been tortuous. The very boldness of his conceptions has caused many people to assume that he could not possibly mean what he said, and to hope that with time Fascism would slough off its most marked characteristics and cool down into a party more or less like any other, ready to give and take. They can hardly think this any more after his last declarations. He has flung out a straight challenge to his adversaries, and, in the absence of any really strong, homogeneous opposition, he may possibly go some way toward realizing his ideal of a state in which “all the power will be to all the Fascists.”
So far as Mussolini is concerned the old Italy, the Italy of Liberals, Democrats, and Socialists, has passed away. We are at the dawn of the new Italy, which needs new institutions, new laws, and an entirely new directive. What is to be the type of the new Italian? He is to have “courage, intrepidity, love of risk, a repugnance for pacifism at all costs, readiness to dare both in individual and in collective life, and a hatred for all that is sedentary. He is to show discipline in work, respect for authority, and to feel pride every hour of the day in the thought that he is Italian.”
This, as a Roman paper calls it, is the breviary of the perfect Fascist. In the new Fascist Government the executive power will practically control the destinies of the nation, for it is continuous and omnipresent.
It is the power that finds itself called at any moment to solve vast problems, to decree great things, to declare war, to conclude peace. This power, which disposes of all the armed forces of the state, which controls day by day the complex machinery of state administration, cannot take a second place. It cannot be represented by a group of puppets who dance according to the caprices of popular assemblies.
A CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION
Yet Parliament is not to be abolished; it is even to be strengthened in one sense by the introduction of new forces. An organization of national syndicates will group the workers and producers of the country together in their different categories and classes. In the Italian Chamber of the future two-thirds of the deputies will be elected as before by universal suffrage, the remaining third will consist of technical representatives of the arts, professions, and industrial and agrarian interests of the country, elected from among the members of the local syndicates. This innovation, which has no precedent, will need the creation of an entirely new electoral law. It forms the basis of the constructive legislation now in course of preparation by a parliamentary commission of eighteen, popularly known as The Solons.
Signor Mussolini openly admits that in his hands Italy’s goal is empire, not necessarily territorial, for empire may be political, economic, or spiritual. Yet Italians must never forget that their capital is Rome, the only city that ever succeeded in founding an empire on the fateful shores of the Mediterranean, and that the realization of the Fascist dream can only be attained by the formation of a granitic block of united national will.
It cannot be denied that these conceptions have a kind of Napoleonic grandeur, while no one can doubt Mussolini‘s ardent patriotism and his genuine belief in the possibility of leading Italy, through his own methods, on the path of happiness and prosperity. Like Napoleon, he has impressed himself upon his country with dynamic force at a critical moment of her history, and future historians may say of him, as Marmont said of his hero, “There was so much future in his mind.” He stands for a reaction which, whatever may be its eventual outcome, has certainly resulted in the greatly increased vitality of the Italian people. He and Fascism together have come through storms which must have broken a smaller man and disintegrated a party that had not in itself some very vital cohesive dements. As it is, the party stands today before the country welded together in that iron discipline which Mussolini wishes to impose upon the whole nation.
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