During the last few weeks an extraordinary fuss has been made over the brutal murder of one of Signor Mussolini’s most able and honourable opponents. Fascism has been put upon its defence. Weak but distinct sounds of disapproval have come from the more respectable sections of the Italian public. Even the London _Times_ has published leading articles that seem to hint at a faint reluctant perception that the Italian dictator is remotely connected with the bloody and filthy terrorism on which his power rests. It is, I say, an extraordinary fuss, a remarkable and almost unaccountable outbreak of the public conscience of Europe. Because it is surely a matter of common knowledge that hundreds of people have been beaten and tortured to death by the Fascisti, that innumerable outrages of a peculiarly dirty kind have been committed, that arson, wreckage, and threats are the normal expedients of Italian political life, and that the power of Mussolini has been built up upon the organisation of such violence. These things have been going on for some years in Italy. Ambitious imitators have arisen in France and Germany and Britain. British “Crusaders” have gathered for the blessing of the Duke of York and strange young men in Oxford and Cambridge have braved misunderstanding by wearing badges bearing the challenging initials B. F. Young Italians in black shirts have even been allowed to insult the decent British dead by cocking snooks--or performing whatever the Fascist salutation is--holding out an arm and twiddling the fingers or something of that sort--at the Westminster Cenotaph. In America, however, there does not seem to be much of a Fascist movement. There has been no temptation for America, with the Ku Klux Klan in active operation and a long tradition of lynch law, to adopt the Italian model. But there have been many American expressions of sympathy with Fascism. And then in the full tide of sunny approval just one more little murder occurs--a murder not essentially different from many other Fascist murders--and the world wakes up to the infernal vileness of a thing that has been plainly before its eyes for years. There never was so remarkable a case of the camel bearing itself bravely up to the very moment of the last straw.