He was particularly interested in what prohibition was doing to working people in the United States. “I am dry,” he said, “but I would not have Italy dry [_sec_].” And he amused me by quickly changing _sec_ to _seche_. “We need wine to keep alive the social sense in our hard-working people.” Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be—was, I believed—a fearful despot, but he had a dimple. I left Italy, my head alive with speculations as to the future of the man. There was a chance, and it seemed to me a very good one, that he would be assassinated. Three dramatic attempts were made on his life while I was there, attempts known to the public. There may have been others, the authorities kept quiet. As I was sailing there came a rash attack on him at Bologna, the assassin being torn to pieces, so it was said, by an enraged crowd. For months after my return I watched my morning paper for the headline, “Mussolini Assassinated.” Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase. And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would finally go down as Napoleon went down. Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon? I was glad to breathe the air of the United States. It was still free, whatever our follies. There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no talk of one. But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which mattered to us: it was what was back of them. Why had parliamentary government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel? Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new form of government? Could this happen in the government of Washington and Lincoln? Those were the questions of importance to Americans. There was where there was something to learn. 19 LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY