_Hon. Mussolini._ Honourable Members,—(Signs of great attention.)—I perform to-day in this hall an act of formal deference towards you for which I do not expect any special gratitude. I have the honour of announcing to the Chamber that His Majesty the King, by a Decree of 31st October, has accepted the resignations of the Hon. Luigi Facta from the office of President of the Council and of his colleagues, Minister and Under-Secretaries of State, and has asked me to form the new Ministry. On the same day His Majesty has appointed me President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs, etc. For many years—for too many years—crises in the Government took place and were solved by more or less tortuous and underhand manœuvres, so much so that a crisis came to be regarded as a regular scramble for portfolios, and the Ministry was caricatured in the comic papers. Now, for the second time in the brief space of seven years, the Italian people, or rather the best part of it, has overthrown a Ministry and formed for itself an entirely new Government from outside, regardless of every Parliamentary designation. The seven years of which I speak lie between the May of 1915 and the October of 1922. I shall leave to the gloomy partisans of super-Constitutionalism the task of discoursing, more or less plaintively, about all this. I maintain that revolution has its rights; and I may add, so that everyone may know, that I am here to defend and give the greatest value to the revolution of the “black shirts,” inserting it intrinsically in the history of the nation as an active force in development, progress and the restoration of equilibrium. (Loud applause from the Left.) I could have carried our victory much further, and I refused to do so. I imposed limits upon my action and told myself that the truest wisdom is that which does not forsake one after victory. With three hundred thousand young men, fully armed, ready for anything and almost religiously prompt to obey any command of mine, I could have punished all those who have slandered the Fascisti and thrown mud at them. (Approval on the Right.) I could have made a bivouac of this gloomy grey hall; I could have shut up Parliament and formed a Government of Fascisti exclusively; I could have done so, but I did not wish to do so, at any rate at the moment. Our adversaries remained in their shelters and then quietly issued forth and obtained their freedom, of which they are already taking advantage to set traps for us and slander us, as at Carate, Bergamo, Udine and Muggia. I have formed a Coalition Government, not with the intention of obtaining a Parliamentary majority, with which at the moment I can perfectly well dispense, but in order to gather together in support of the suffering nation all those who, over and above questions of party and section, wish to save her.