A 1922 Description of the Fascists in Italy

[Excerpted from Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Immortal Italy (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), pp. 344-374]

THE REACTION THAT FAILED

A fascio is a bunch or bundle. When applied to persons the word can best be translated as a band or gang. There have been fasci in Italy, especially in Sicily, before now. The miscellaneous interventionist groups of 1915 were called Fasci. A number of deputies who, after Caporetto, banded together for the vigorous prosecution of hostilities, took the name of fascio. After the war, therefore, when many ex-soldiers organized in little groups, what more logical than that they too should call their organizations fighting bands (fasci di combattimento) and themselves collectively fascisti or bandsmen. So much for the name.

But the substance is new and strange. The fascisti have fulfilled a role unique in recent Italian history. Similar in spirit to the more intolerant elements of the American Legion, not unlike in their methods to the ancient and revived Ku Klutz Klan, they have outdone both. For though animated to some extent by unselfish motives, they have nevertheless served as the instrument for a vast attempt at capitalist reaction, become the weapon for electoral fraud on a scale hitherto unknown even in Italy, and spread terror and hatred throughout half the peninsula. None the less the reaction that they sought to actuate failed simply because it was directed against a revolutionary plan that had been abandoned by all but the most visionary of its adherents.

Largely viewed, the fascisti movement is merely a phase of the world-wide reaction which successful war made inevitable and which was delayed in Italy owing to the anti-militarism, indolence, skepticism and individualism of the Italians themselves. But in its formal aspects the fascisti movement demands explanation.

Italy is still the classic land of the faction and the brawl, the swift murder and the lasting vendetta. No public manifestation, it would seem, no assembly or election can be held without a fight. As often as not there are persons killed. Such belligerent tactics have, since the war, been introduced even into the Chamber of Deputies, where the members pummel one another publicly to the music of hoarsely vociferated vituperation, then go outside and make it up. But the war did not give birth to this violence in action: it merely revived a state of mind apparent in most of the history of Italy The medieval Roman families, Colonna, Savelli, Orsini; the Guelphs and the Ghibellines; the White Guelphs and the BlackÑthey were merely the communists and the fascisti of another epoch. The Italians have rarely made national war, but factional, communal, personal war has been their pastime and their delight. In the fascisti of to-day something of the communal spirit is still present.

Italy and the Italian government are almost always under the open or veiled control of a violent or corruptive factionÑa "resolute minority," the Italians call it. Such a minority forced Italy into the war against the apathy of the majority; such a minority insisted on carrying the triune episode to the end; such a minority led the labor classes to the brink of revolution. In a country most of which is still habitually passive and which considers the central authority a kind of cruel stepfather to be cajoled, swindled and thwarted, government by faction is inevitable. Usually, to be sure, such government has been peaceful, and as often as not, occluded from the vulgar eye. But occasionally it becomes violent. In case of clash between two such factions, the real Government sits tight and waits until the stronger prevails, then enters the arena on the side of the winner. Such tactics are not so entirely opportunist as they seem. For to prevail a faction must possess at least the temporary sympathy of that small public opinion which really counts. Communist fanatics at the head of the labor organizations were able to rule the country for nearly two years because public opinion preferred them to the alternative government bay the Army and strong secretive men. When the communists failed to keep their promises, when the bubble of Russian utopia had been pricked, the fascisti rose from the womb of the middle class and imposed their will in the name of the law, and order and capital. The common man was tired of communist violence and arbitrary rule by manual laborers. The fascisti promised something elseÑso evviva i fascistiÑfor the time being.

ITALY, IN JANUARY, 1921

By January, 1921, a month before the annual congress, the Italian socialists were divided and in full retreat. The communists had lost caste. The saner leaders had visited Russia and pronounced the revolution there a failureÑcertainly nothing to be imitated in Italy. The labor organizations were all for defending the privileged economic position they had won. To push further claims would be futile in view of the black cloud of industrial crisis they could see sweeping across Europe. The masses, sick of revolutionary promises perpetually unrealized, had abandoned the fiery young communists and were looking again for guidance to their tried navigators, Serrati, Turati, Zibordi, Modigliani, who promised a longer voyage but a sure port. These politicians had shrewdly predicted that in Italy violence could only lead to counter violence, attempted revolution to reaction. But just at the moment the socialist brig was changing pilots and endeavoring to head up and trim sails, the gale of fascistm struck and staggered it.

THE SOIL OF FASCISM

The Government, following the time-honored custom, had submitted to the communists when they had seemed strong. Nitti had imposed heavy taxes, made a small levy on capital, and threatened a forced loan. Giolitti forced through measures for the registration of stocks and shares and the revision and confiscation of excessive war profits. Both had virtually recognized the right of the peasants to occupy the land and had greatly favored the labor cooperatives, which occupy a large Place in the national economy. Giolitti had morever accepted in theory, the principle of trade union supervision of industry and had done nothing to check the extraordinary red tyranny in the agricultural basin of the Po, where communists, socialists, republicans and Catholics vied with one another in their efforts to satisfy and win over the spoiled farm laborers.

The Italian manufacturers and profiteers were extremely reluctant to admit that the glorious period of easy fortunesÑthe cuccagna of warÑhad closed. At the first wind of danger they withdrew whatever capital they could from their swollen industries and put it in a safe place; and at the time of the factory lock-in, considered getting out altogether. The Owners of the Fiat company offered to sell the entire industry to their employees. Several companies were running close to bankruptcy. In the succeeding months one of the largest companies, the Ilva, did practically fail in circumstances that recall those with which the American anti-trust laws had sought to deal. Past dividends, however elephantine, had been irrevocably disturbed. What the owners wanted was not vexatious financial measures and revision of war contracts, but ultra tariff protection and generous subsidies. Otherwise, they threatened, they would be forced to reduce or shut down the plants. Dare the Government permit several hundred thousand unruly workmen to be turned into the streets to riots

To keep up the national spirit the profiteersÑall those who had, for a consideration, made the munitions of victoryÑacquired the control of a fairly large section of the press, which identified the interests of their owners with those of the nation. On principle these sheets favored an aggressive foreign policy. Some of the owners undoubtedly staked D'Annunzio. To the jazz of another war the dance of profits might well continue a year or two longer. When the first fasci proved themselves adequate to the task of disciplining labor, the industrial owners became generous with applause and stimulants.

The land owners in the North were fighting with their backs to the wall; either they must thrust back the red wave or yield their property altogether. When two or three episodes of barbaric violence (at Bologna and Ferrara) had aroused the horror of the entire country against the reds, the agrarians determined they would die fighting.

The theories of the fascisti were largely provided by the nationalists from their miscellaneous intellectual baggage. To the nationalists the State is god and they its true hierophants. Violence and biological struggle are natural to man and prevent him from becoming "vile. " They discovered in the fasci that "pure" flame of patriotism which distinguishes the national elite from hypocritical demagogues. Naturally they favored high protection in order to preserve in Italian hands the manufacture of war material and other necessities "for the coming war." At Rome, where they were strongest, fascism meant essentially the keeping of the Adriatic question in a state of permanent fester.

The conservative cure for all the woes of after-war Italy was military dictatorship. In this capitalists, nationalists, D'Annunzians and the upper military circles agreed. Army chiefs, conservatives, nationalists and early fascisti undoubtedly plotted with the poet to enthrone a dictator and imagined that he would carry out an Italian revolution. At least two supposed plots gained public notice (in June 1919 and November 1920). The king was to go and a military dictatorship of Gabriele D 'Annunzio and General Giardino would enthrone his cousin the Duke of Aosta.

Much smoke and no fire ! The truth of these plots, whereof echoes and new versions continue to swell the small talk of drawing-rooms, has never been revealed. But they sufficiently showed the sincere feeling of a large part of the Army, smarting under allied and internal provocation, and progressively unwilling to tolerate insults to their patriotism. But excepting in one spot the hands of the Army were tied. Here on the eastern frontier where the Fiume question kept large bodies of men mobilizedÑArmy resentment was openly expressed.

The middle class in Venetia Julia and Istria was to a great extent Italian; the common people were almost solidly Slav. And these Slavs were openly hostile to their conquerors and everywhere came into immediate conflict with them. The Slavs had no intention of becoming good Italians if they could help it. Many of them, from conviction or expediency, made common cause with the anti-patriotic Italian communists. But these regions were held under military law and with a civil governor whose sympathies were with the Army. The exasperation of the military gentlemen emerged in a somewhat frantic yet entirely human effort to knock a sense of humility into the unruly Slav communists. If they could not be made good Italians they could at least be forced to listen to their conquerors' vae victis. In this quite un-Italian act of folly the Army was, in part at least, led by the " redeemed " Italians of the region, who sought formal revenge on their former persecutors.

Venetia Julia and Istria were treated like conquered provinces, which indeed they were. The majority of the population was certainly hostile to Italy. Hundreds of persons were therefore arrested for this hostility, defined as treason, and for spreading discontent and for imaginary plots. Worst of all, these prisoners were liable, if they happened to be communists, to beating and bad treatment. Police brutalityÑlatent in every land Ñwas allowed to emerge into daylight Beyond these measures, which did not blot out the feeling of revolt among the Slavs or cause them to abjure their communist faith, men in uniform could not go. The spectacle of Italian soldiers and police openly burning centers of Slav feeling and labor headquarters would have caused echoes and more than echoes at Rome. A more efficient weapon was therefore found in the fasci of volunteers, and the fascio at Trieste became, we are told by an enthusiastic nationalist, a model for the other fasci soon to spread throughout the country. Fascism in Venetia Julia and Istria remained primarily a weapon for subduing the local Slavs and "learning them to be toads. "

THE THEORY OF FASCISM

In practice fascism proved to be "dynamically conservative," yet in theory it was and remained revolutionary. Its unquestioned founder, Benito Mussolini (born 1884), was formerly a red of the reds. His lieutenants were likewise rebels. Umberto Pasella and Agostino Lansillo had both been syndicalists; Michele Terzaghi was, like Mussolini, an ex-socialist. These men imparted a strong revolutionary spirit to the movement, which they proclaimed " republican in tendency. " Temperamentally the early fascisti were similar to the advanced communists, equally opposed to liberalism, democracy and pacifism, equally ready for a fight, exalting heroic violence in opposition to the current "worship of the belly. " From their syndicalist origin they also derived their chief doctrines, the cult of the "productive forces" and the shifting of center in the economic struggle from the field of distribution to that of production. By 1920 (though they did not yet come out as a political party) they had formulated a program of some clarity.

They aimed to defend the nation and the victory against foreign aggression and bolshevik violence This done, their task was to stimulate production The enemy was not socialism but the parasite whether workman or capitalist. Whatever economic organization should prove best fitted to produce that they would defend. They declared themselves favorable to the 8-hour day, all sorts of workman's insurance, cooperative management of public works and public utilities, a national council for production (not unlike a soviet), a tax on capital and heredity, the confiscation of church property and excess war profits, the reduction of the State powers and the bureaucracy. In foreign policy they were "aggressive. " Hence the support of the Fiume raid and the scheming for " republican dictatorship. " Mussolini has written: "The interest of the nation is above that of single groups and classes, even above those of a single generation." The arbiters of the national interest should be chosen, not from decrepit and corrupt politicians, but from among young, daring, intuitive individuals with energy to govern, not afraid to use those violent methods the occasion might demand, but not necessarily pledged to lawlessness.

So instructed, the first fasci di combattimento remained practically inactive for nearly two years, their only accomplishments being the sacking of the offices of the Milan Avanti! and the support given D 'Annunzio. Then, allied with the Army in Venetia Julia, and with Capital in Emilia, they began a real offensive on organized labor, recruited their numbers from among all ranks of Respectability and, ceasing to be militia, assumed the aspect and tactics of " vigilantes. "

THE FASCISTI AT WORK

"A-yah, a-yah, ah lah lah!" with the accent on the last ringing note. This was the cry that, with the fascist hymn and shouts of A basso Lenin, brought panic and confusion into the ranks of millions of Italian workers and peasants. It was accompanied by the thuds of blows, by a frantic and sometimes mortal firing of revolvers, by the explosion of hand grenades, the rumble of heavy camions. It meant destruction, violence, usually death and the disappearance of the material signs of thirty years of slow socialist progress.

The first fascisti, largely youths with no knowledge of the doctrines of communism but instinctive hatred of labor rule, went about their work of destruction and danger to the shout of Viva l'Italia!

There had been provocation. Even the socialist Avanti! (August 20,1921) admitted that the fascisti order sprang up against revolutionary disorder in defense of the State. What alarmed the thoughtful fascisti was the evidence of the communal elections of October, 1920, which showed that the socialist strength was not on the wane. Italy is divided administratively into provinces, each with a prefect at the head. The province is divided into communes, each of which includes not only a single town or village but the country round as far as the limits of the adjacent communes. Each commune elects a municipal council. When a municipal council becomes offensive to the Prefect he can suppress it and a royal commissary is appointed who administers it until the next election. In the municipal election of 1920 the socialists conquered practically the same percentage of the 8000 odd communes as they had of the 508 posts as deputy a year previously.

Many large centers, including Milan, Bologna and Leghorn, remained in their hands and they just missed taking political possession of Turin and Florence. Another year might see them in the majority in all North Italy and, as the strongest organized party, openly controlling the country. A socialist government, however mild, was a greater bogey to the capitalists than any number of noisy communists in the street. And when, at the inauguration of the Bolognese municipal council, a panic stricken communist murdered a popular lawyer and war veteran in the council chamber, the fascio of Bologna rose in violent rebellion. [The slayer, a certain Galli, has been disavowed by the socialists.]

Soldiers, students, professional men, officers, shopkeepers, all joined the fascio. Red leaders like Bucco and Zanardi, who had been the virtual dictators of the city, were beaten, forced to renege their opinions, and violently exiled from the city under threat of death. Small groups of fascisti, armed with various weapons and resolute decision, affronted the numerous but dismayed socialists and drove them headlong. The municipal council was forced to resign. Fascisti pulled down the red flag from the town hall and the socialist centers, tore up the portraits of Karl Mars and Lenin, and forbade labor meetings altogether. Finally, (January 24 1921), they burned the local Chamber of Labor, the headquarters of the red movement.

" That night, " melodramatically writes Enrico Corradini, the nationalist leader, "I saw the fortress of the enemy, the Chamber of Labor, disappear in flames. Cheering citizens assisted at the spectacle while policemen, carbineers, guards and soldiers watched the flames devour the building with their arms at rest."

The terrible reds proved incapable of violent resistance! The more recent communist leaders generally showed the most abject cowardice. They were, to be sure, attacked when in full retreat at a moment of strategic weakness. Nothing, however, can excuse the miserable ease with which many, under pain of threats or violence, signed declarations disowning their life's work and praising the Cases, or meekly resigned from those positions to which they had been lawfully elected. The older leaders watched the fulfillment of their predictions as to the results of violence with sad satisfaction, and counselled passivity. The unguided masses were helpless. In the first months the fascisti reigned supreme: fifty could control a large town, four "occupy" a village of two thousand hostile souls.

A few persons, such as the deputy, Maffi, manfully refused to submit; a few localities, strongholds of communists, catholics, or republicans, resisted successfully. But in a short time the large communist centers, Bologna, Ferrara, Rovigo, Reggio Emilia, Modena, were under the military rule of the fascisti. Communists who resisted were beaten or worse. Fascist sentinels patrolled the streets and "kept order. " Public opinion applauded. The shopkeepers were delighted. The socialist administrations had governed openly in favor of the workers. At Reggio municipal pharmacies, bakeries, a mill, and the macaroni factory had practically suppressed private enterprise in the same trade.

The fascisti soon organized on strictly military lines. They had turns of guard duty, headquarters, secret emissaries, and equipped themselves for rapid tactics with captions and automobiles. A telegram could bring hundreds together in a few hours. All carried large sticks, many wore revolvers, a few even rifles and steel helmets and hand grenades. In the country they usually worked at night; elsewhere they descended upon the towns in broad daylight with a terrible rattle of revolvers fired in the air and their fateful cry, "A-yah, a-yah, ah lah lah!"

Fascism was a spontaneous outbreak, not a regular movement. Few of its adherents were aware of or had accepted its theoretical program. Even in practice it varied greatly from place to place.

In Istria and Venetia Julia fasci destroyed the various Chambers of Labor, the cooperative seats, the popular libraries, and (at Trieste) the Lavoratore newspaper and the Slav Hotel Balkan.

In the Po valley the fascisti worked in the name of the agrarians and uprooted the red agricultural leagues. Village after village was attacked and terrified, the labor leaders beaten, tortured, murdered. Around Ferrara all the leagues were compelled to adhere to the fascio. All the men whom proletarian dictatorship had disgusted, officers, sons of land owners, victims of former boycotts and fines, adhered joyously; the others were "persuaded."

The following is a description by a socialist of the tactics employed in the Province of Rovigno:

"They appear before a little house and the order is heard. ' Surround the building. ' They are twenty to a hundred persons armed with rifles and revolvers. They call the capolega [head of a socialist agricultural league] and order him to come down. If he does not descend they say, 'If you don't we'll burn your house, your wife, your children.' The capolega comes down. If he opens the door they seize and tie him, carry him away on a camion, subject him to indescribable torture, pretending to kill or drown him; and then abandon him in the open country, naked, tied to a tree.

"If he is a brave man and does not open the door and defends himself with arms, then it is immediate assassination . . . in the heart of the night, a hundred against one. "

Thus the fascio of Ferrara captured the red leagues and held them under a reign of terror.

As the movement spread, the methods were enlarged to include riot and provocation, kidnapping and the searching of private citizens. "Where the socialists offered no pretext and the owners paid, the fascisti themselves picked the quarrel: Socialism in Italy must disappear. In the "mild" Province of Rovigo alone, in a short time four to five thousand socialists were violently handled and three hundred houses burned. In much of North Italy the socialist press was destroyed by fire.

Fascism in Central Italy was essentially a social and intellectual rebellion of the aristocracy and capitalist classes against labor prosperity and rowdy conduct. In the words of a Florentine sympathizer, "If a district is incurably bad [read, independent, or unruly] the fascism intervene . . . and assume control. Then in its turn the government intervenes. "Old local feuds emerged and communal rivalry. The citizens of Perugia watched all night on the city walls to welcome the fascisti of Perugia back from the sack of the labor organizations at Terni. Imagine the joy of a true Florentine in helping to destroy the Chamber of Labor of Siena! Or the atavistic pleasure of the Florentine burghers at the attack on the laborers and roughs of the San Erediano quarter, with its violence and bloodshed. Italy seemed to have retrograded six hundred years.

In Rome fascism meant little but Adriatic bombast, an assault on the baggage of a regularly invited bolshevik commercial mission, an attempt to check profiteering, the searching of a few peaceful citizens, the closing of shops by force on the occasions of fascisti defeats and a rowdy national congress.

One night (March 29, 1921) eight fascisti armed with rifles and helmets boarded the express train at Terontola and examined one by one the personal papers of all the passengers, including those who were asleep in their berths. The police looked on indulgently....

In the South fascism failed miserably except where backed by the Government for its own purposes. In Sicily the fascisti were merely a new edition in a patriotic cover of the venerable mafia.

Everywhere the fasci were financed by business men, land owners, patriots, all those with an interest in cheap labor or a score to settle with the socialists. In parts of Tuscany each rich man pledged himself to 'pay a subsidy proportionate to the aid he asks. "

The land owners frankly avowed that their enemy was socialist propaganda in any form and their aim to reduce the pay of the farm hands. Where the fasts flourished the owners broke the old contracts and in some places refused the recognized principle of collective bargaining. Naturally therefore we find the period of fascisti ascendancy in the country coinciding with the erection (by royal decree and without Parliamentary discussion) of a new tariff barrier higher than the old, with the attempted formation of a conservative agrarian political party, with a general period of industrial crisis and unemployment. "The action of the Fasci," said Filippo Turati, "corresponded to the need of certain parasite industrial and agrarian owners to throw upon the nation and the workers the consequences and burdens of the war and their fear of the workers' legitimate resistance, and the necessity of making a clean sweep of their conquests and fortresses. " [Speech in the Chamber of Deputies, July 22, 1921]

Italy had been united by the action of an energetic and unofficial minority; the tradition served to justify the unauthorized action both of D'Annunzio and of the fasci. Moreover, the Italian middle class, with no real tradition or understanding of popular government, was already homesick for the easy period of the war, when with liberty suppressed, criticism abolished, and law promulgated by royal decree, administration had been a simple and highly profitable affair.

Never did the inherent weakness of the Italian stateÑthe terrible absence of patriotic understandingÑappear more blatantly than during the dictatorship of the fasci. Enough to say that the State organs, Army, police, magistracy and functionaries took the side of a wild faction whose methods were at best illegal, at worst abhorrently barbarous. To be sure, the state employees had for years been butts of derision on the part of the communists; the police and army had been the victim of much violence and scorn. It was natural that having found allies in the fascisti, who praised their work, they should discriminate between fascist and communist illegality in favor of the former. But precisely because this discrimination was natural, it merited severe repression. The illegal favoritism of many public servants, from the Prime Minister down, was disgraceful.

:From the Army the fascisti received sympathy, assistance and war material. Officers in uniform took part in its punitive expeditions. The fascisti were allowed to turn national barracks into their private arsenals. The facts are proven. Thus the Army revenged itself on the anti-patriots.

In the presence of murder, violence and arson, the police remained "neutral. " With their full knowledge and consent these bands scurried along the white roads in their camions, bent on assault, and armed to the teeth. The police captains refused to heed warnings of intended excursions and where they could not refuse a summons to defend unarmed workmen and peasants, deliberately arrived too late. When armed bands compelled the socialists to resign from office under pain of death, or regularly tried and condemned their enemies to blows, banishment or execution, the functionaries merely shrugged their shoulders, or like the Prefect of Reggio Emilia, answered, " That 's the way the wind is blowing. " Sometimes carbineers and royal guards openly made common cause with the fascisti, and paralyzed the resistance of the peasants. Against the fascisti alone, the latter might have held their own. Against fascisti and police together, they were helpless and their complaints merely caused the authorities to arrest . . . them, as guilty of attempting to defend themselves. Socialists were condemned for alleged crimes committed months, years, before. Fascisti taken red-handed were released for want of evidence! When they thought it necessary the fascisti telegraphed friendly advice to the Prefects.

"In Italy," remarks the genial Prezzolini, "the Government does not command.... No one commands but all impose themselves." [Codice della Vita Italiana.] Prime Minister Giolitti with that genius for the devious path and the camorra which has made him great among his countrymen, was already planning to use the fascisti for his own purposes in the coming election.

PREPARING THE ELECTIONS

The administrative methods perfected by Giovanni Giolitti and applied by him with the most exquisite opportunism, rely upon the all but universally verified assumption of human frailty. They can be summed up in three maxims:

1. Every man has either something to obtain or something to conceal.

2. No personal service should go unrewarded, no hurt unpunished.

3. The people can be either hoodwinked, or bluffed, or bullied.

Such a noble conception does not however aim exclusively at satisfying the ambition of the Boss and his friends. Giolitti has ideals.... He desires the gradual awakening of Italian national consciousness and the absorption of the various revolutionary forces by the liberal Italian monarchy under the Piedmontese House of Savoy. For fifteen years he has favored the working class in order to tame the socialists. The war which exiled him from power enabled them to get ahead of him. The socialists became a true people's party. The old methodsÑ candy and spankingsÑno longer disciplined the adolescent. So nothing remained but to draw the leaders into political collaboration with the middle class and having caged them in the Ministries, draw the strings from their tails. But so long as the socialists remained so numerous they would be dangerous to the Giolitti ideal. A general election was first necessary to reduce their numbers. Accordingly, with that cynical independence which characterizes his wilder moods, the Prime Minister dissolved the chamber (April 8, 1921), under pretext that a working majority could not be obtained. For the new elections (May 15) he united the "constitutional" parties and secured an alliance with the fascisti, hoping at the same time to exclude the latter from office through the preferential vote which the proportional representation in use permits. His political lieutenants, with all the weapons of the police and the bureaucracy at their disposal, joined the fascisti in preparing the elections.

The Prime Minister's ideal in such cases can be imagined from the following statistics (the period covered is January 1, 1921ÑMay 31, 1921):

[The figures are those of the socialists, Avanti! (June Ed, 1921) but their probable accuracy is attested by other sources. The London Nation states that during the first 17 days of electoral campaigning in Italy (April 5-21) 60 persons were shot, 34 beaten with clubs, 49 assassinated (43 socialists and 6 fascisti), 40 houses invaded and sacked (38 socialist and 2 fascist), 7 buildings burned, 212 socialists and 2 fascisti arrested, and 11 protest strikes declared.The official Vatican Osservatore Romano states (May 18, 1921 ) that the number of victims on election day (on which side we can imagine!} were 4a dead and 70 wounded.]

From such meticulous preparations, the Prime Minister and his henchmen expected the legitimate triumph of the Parties of Progress, Order and Constitutional Liberty.

ELECTION BY CLUBBERS

In certain neglected regions of the South, Giovanni Giolitti had in previous elections achieved merited success by the organization for electoral purposes of gangs armed with enormous sticks, who under the paternal eye of Police and Prefect (without violating the law against the carrying of real weapons) secured the triumph of the Government candidates by the ingenious device of preventing the opponents from voting. In 1921 the same system was applied to most of Italy.

In large sections of Romagna, Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria and the Puglie the united fascisti and carbineers drove the socialists from the polling places snatched and destroyed their ballots, or lined them up and "instructed" them while they voted. Thus in Istria, where intimidation was used, outside the town of Pola only twenty per cent voted at all, and an unquestioned Slavic majority "elected" one Slav and three Italian patriots of the fascio. In one Sicilian town the number of voters is said to have surpassed the total number of registered electors; in another locality the Under Prefect captained the mafia to victory. Rural Tuscany and Umbria found voting as exciting as war. Even the Clerical Populars shared in the persecution; a "month of violence" preluded a "day of terror." At Perugia the electoral secret was violated. At Castiglione del Lago the peasants were marched to the polling places and obliged to vote. Among the governmental candidates elected were an Under Secretary of State and the Prime Minister's faithful doctor, Agostino Mattoli! At Pinerolo in Piedmont documentary evidence was produced by the socialists to show that an ex-minister, Luigi Facta, promised a pound of soap from a friendly factory to each supporter in ease he be elected at the head of the list !

Such methods promised sure success; yet they failed. Proportional representation proved, except in cases of actual violence, corruption proof. The real hold of the socialists on the masses was demonstrated by the fact that the number of their deputies (plus the communists) was reduced by less than twenty and in another atmosphere would hardly have been diminished at all. The Clerical Populars, reputed almost as dangerous to the established order as the socialists, actually gained. The fascisti almost everywhere surpassed the government candidates in number of votes and elected forty-five deputies, who entered the Chamber full of fight. As a reaction against the reds and the clericals, the election failed. Temporarily it gave over the country to the fascisti, who considered themselves the party of the future and the real masters of the situation. Theirs was a delusion of short duration. Public opinion, disgusted by their lawlessness and tyranny, had shifted against them.

THE MIDDLE CLASS CLAMORS FOR LAW AND ORDER

The results of the election caused Guglielmo Ferrero to write wisely that the "burning of the Chambers of Labor, the Cooperatives, and the labor headquarters" had "balanced in the public mind all the errors and foolishness committed by the socialists after the elections of 1919."

The fascisti remained blithely unaware of the change. Their leader Mussolini had predicted that the political power would soon pass from the hands of Giovanni Giolitti to those of Gabriele D 'Annunzio.

Immediately after the election he announced that the fascisti, being "republican in tendency," would not be present at the opening of the new session, at which the king is always present. The nationalists and conservatives in the fascist ranks were horrified and threatened a schism.

Throughout Italy the fasci had grown extravagantly. They now claimed a thousand fasci with almost two hundred thousand adherents. A fascio had even been organized among the Italians of the United States. The leaders, however, tended steadily away from their capitalist employers toward their revolutionary doctrinal basis. They still protected the land owners but now claimed their subsidy as a right and blackmailed those who refused it.

After a successful attempt to banish from the Chamber of Deputies the communist Misiano, reputed a deserter, their exuberance knew no bounds. They could no longer be satisfied with anything less than entire rule. Punitive expeditions on an immense scale were organized against those localities which still dared oppose or criticize the fasci. Grosseto in Tuscany and the small village of Roccastrada were captured amid unheard of violence. But the culmination was the attack on the large town of Treviso in Venetia. The republicans and clericals of Treviso were guilty of having defended the farm laborers of a near-by village (Ca' Tron) against two tyrannical cultivators and had criticized the fascisti. Such an act of lèse fascism, could not go unpunished.

Fifteen hundred men, brought together from districts as remote as Tuscany and Trieste, armed with rifles, hand grenades, machine guns and steel helmets part of which had been supplied by the regular troops, arrived before Treviso late one evening (July 12, 1921) in a hundred camions preceded by a white motor car. Under cover of darkness they surrounded the walled town and penetrated into the streets. Their plan was complete, their enemy "whoever isn't a Fascista." First they broke into and sacked the offices of the clerical newspaper, Il Piave, and then those of the republican Riscossa, where a few defenders were overcome after some hours of siege. Dawn found the fascisti masters of the town, for the police and soldiers had assumed an attitude of "benevolent neutrality." So for a few hours the fascisti tyrannized the place, sacking a few shops and houses, and then withdrew, highly satisfied with themselves.

The attack on Treviso recalled the Italian middle class to their senses; the country was shocked: many fascisti protested. The catholic peasants of the country around Treviso would have murdered every fascisti in the district if they had not been held in by the leaders. Such an act of unprovoked violence was extreme, unwonted, said the respectable citizens. The fascisti had gone outside their real zone, etc. Men's opinions changed over night. In a single day the newspapers ceased to praise and began to speak of excesses.

Giovanni Giolitti, scenting danger, took the first opportunity to resign. A lie by the Foreign Secretary about Port Baross of Fiume, had enraged the nationalists and reaction by the fascisti had brought the country to the verge of civil war.

THE PEOPLE DEFEND THEMSELVES

The Italian common people are ignorant, long suffering and easily bullied, but they are not cowards. After the first surprise they would have held their own against the fascisti had not the latter been aided by the police. It was only against the carbineers and royal guards that they proved, once they awakened to the situation, entirely helpless. Then they began to use the universal weapon of the hopelessly oppressed, assassination. Policemen and fascisti in considerable numbers were stabbed by night on lonely roads or picked off by day with a rifle from a hidden clump of trees. If discovered the assassins took to the mountains where, assisted by an entirely friendly population, they revived the all but extinct tradition of brigandage. Only after it became clear that they had absolutely nothing to hope from the government, and Giolitti resigned to hide his failure to curb the fasci, the people began to band together in self-defense. In the countrysides peasant war veterans began to challenge the night riders; certain Catholics, who took the name of God's Arditi, distinguished themselves by the ferociousness of their counter attacks. In the cities the nucleus of the new irregular army was drawn from a group of ex-arditi (storm troops) and organized under the name of Arditi of the People.

Their founder, an ex-officer named Argo Secondari, took the right tack from the first. The Arditi of the People were organized in the full light Of day with considerable newspaper publicity, and recruited from republicans, socialists, communists and anarchists. The first funds were supposedly subscribed by a secret republican organization. Many clericals, though abstaining from participation, were sympathetic. In a week after their organization the first Arditi of the People were patrolling the streets of Rome by night and imitating the fascisti by stopping, searching and threatening their enemies. But as far as possible their action was restricted to a threat.

The effect of this organization on the Italian middle class was magical. For fifty years this class had bullied, cheated and abused the common people and naturally feared nothing in the world so much as a jacquerie or peasant uprising, because they knew it would be justified. With such a movement Italy seemed threatened. Even the revolutionary members of the fasci were horrified to find the common people taking arms against them. The fasci claimed to have liberated the workers from red tyrants and to have sought to stop profiteering. Yet instead of gratitude they received only cordial and general hatred.

The attempt of a large number of them to storm the town of Viterbo failed miserably. The citizens armed themselves, blocked the gates with barbed wire and manned the walls; while their women prepared kettles of boiling water to pour on the assailants. Only the forethought of the police prevented the train load of fascisti from being torn to pieces. By mistake the defenders fired on an automobile containing English tourists and killed a child.

The new Prime Minister, Ivanoe Bonomi, had taken office with a promise to enforce the law. The police received orders to this effect. For fascism was rapidly rendering the country unsafe for foreigners as well as for Italians. The killing of the English child came on top of the arrest and trial at Florence of a family of innocent American tourists amid the most open intimidation by the local fascio. A Frenchman in the same town was set upon and beaten because the fascisti mistook the Legion d'Honneur ribbon in his lapel for a communist emblem. Naturally the Foreign Governments protested.

Finally the police did their duty. The carbineers resisted the attempt of a large body of bandsmen to storm the town of Sarzana in the Carrara district (July 31, 1921). As the fascisti retreated in disorder before the fire of the police, the population, a rough crowd of stone cutters and reinforced by a battalion of Arditi of the People, fell upon them and massacred all whom they could lay hands on. Fascism had finally become dangerous even when practiced en masse.

From all classes and districts appeals were lifted heavenward for peace.

A fitting culmination to all the absurd and aimless violence since the armistice was now found. On August 2, 1921, Victor Emmanuel III reigning in the Kingdom of Italy, accredited representatives of the two sovereign factions, the Socialists and the Fasci, under the august influence of the President of a lesser third faction, the Chamber of Deputies, met at Rome and signed a solemn Treaty of Peace whereby each agreed henceforth to respect the law of the land. The mental state of the country can be judged by the fact that this was considered a great triumph for the new Prime Minister.

A few days later when the Government had finally decided that existing law (when enforced) was sufficient to guarantee order, Prime Minister Bonomi issued a long circular to the Prefects declaring that various crimes and misdemeanors should no longer be tolerated.

Officially, the fascist reaction was over.

THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Immediate peace could hardly be expected. "Minds were too excited," as the Italians say; anyway it was fanciful to imagine that any agreement could be immediately and scrupulously respected in Italy. The communists ignored the peace and continued to incite to class war. The reactionary fasci in Tuscany and Emilia had agreements with the rich men and land owners not to permit the return of the banished socialist organizers. But when they openly refused to accept the peace signed by the best of their leaders, the latter hotly resigned and with them went the real strength of the organization. Benito Mussolini defended his resignation by declaring (August 10, 1921) that "fascism is no longer liberation but tyranny, no longer the safeguard of the nation but the defense of private interests...." Everybody knew this, but it was comforting to have it confessed by the angry leader.

To be sure, the fascisti for many months continued to carry out deeds of violence; Arditi of the People were heard of here and there; many functionaries protected the one and attacked the other. Many villages continued under a sovereign local government, like Castiglione in Teverina, where a certain Count Vannicelli, a fascista, passed sentence of death on political offenders, or Pisoniano, also near Rome, which remained a stronghold of communists who considered private property through the eyes of Lenin. But, on the whole, Italy settled down to a condition of normal anarchy. Statescraft has ceased to be anything but the equilibrium of disruptive forces. The Italian government acts like a fat, indignant old lady amid a crowd of her unruly sons. Since she cannot make them behave she is forced to set them one against the other. It protects her tranquillity at the expense of prestige.

Several of the wild shoots of Italian socialism undoubtedly deserved amputation and the fasci served their country by severing them from the main trunk. But socialism is only the stronger for this severing of connection with foreign communism, and better able to maintain itself in the tempest of business crisis and unemployment. It is less political and more economic. Without the shadow of a doubt the socialists are stronger to-day than ever before and should they decide to become a reasonably patriotic party and accept the responsibility of governing, their immediate future seems secure. To-day their economic interests force them to work for pacification.

Thus weariness and economic pressure, which would make for readjustment, are still in conflict with revolutionary nationalism and widespread middle class discontent, which push toward upheaval. Between the two, Italian reconstruction and pacification are largely postponed. Though it would seem that the conservative forces must win out, sporadic violence or attempted revolution is still possible. Certain Italians themselves, with their selfish lack of discipline, still stand between their country and the brilliant future to which the sober industry and the intelligence of the masses entitle her.