“Giovinezza, giovinezza Primavera di bellezza.” Socialists and Communists were quickly cowed. The governmental troops, most of them members or sympathizers of the Fascisti, could not be counted upon. The King had the choice of calling Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascisti, to form a cabinet, or of losing his throne. The Fascist movement had made such great progress in Italy since 1920 and was so well organized that civil war was out of the question. Almost everybody sympathized with the program of the Fascisti. So Mussolini became premier, and has been the uncontested, though unconstitutional, ruler of Italy for more than a year. Fascismo is primarily a movement of the youth of Italy, under youthful leaders, most of them born half a century after Giolitti, and none of them in the same generation with the men who were the political leaders of Italy up to the summer of 1922. Despite the pronouncement of the first Rome congress, in the autumn of 1921, Fascismo is not a political party. Its strength as such is negligible. Born at a meeting in Milan in 1919, its purpose, in the words of Mussolini, was defined as a movement “of the spiritual forces of Italy to awaken in Italians the full sense of their own greatness and destiny as a nation.... And it proposes at any cost, even at the cost of Democratic conventions, to crush any tendency that may threaten to drag the Italian people into the morass of Socialism, Bolshevism, and Internationalism.” From the beginning of the movement Mussolini has insisted that the future of the nation must be in the hands of those who are to live that future, and that the time had come to put Italy into her true place among the nations of the world.