The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well. If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them. Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for fifteen years. What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the narrowest margin. One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak. This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s _Rogue Male_. The general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a plot against the life of the head of the State. Q. _In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to remember all those considerations you have advanced?_ A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.