_On your Vote will depend in a certain sense your Fate!_ I agree with all the speakers who have declared that the country wishes only to be left alone; to work in peace with discipline. And my Government makes enormous efforts to achieve this result and will go on, even if it has to strike its own followers, because, having wished for a strong State, it is only just that we should be the first to experience the consequences of strength. (Loud applause.) I have also the duty of telling you—and I tell you from a debt of loyalty—that on your vote depends in a certain sense your fate! Do not delude yourselves, even in this field, because nobody gets out of the Constitution—neither I nor the others—as nobody can suppose that he is not amply guaranteed according to the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. (Comment.) And then, if things are thus, I tell you, take into account this necessity. Do not let the country have once again the impression that Parliament is far from the soul of the nation and that this Parliament, after having manœuvred for an entire week in a campaign of opposition, has achieved sterile results at the end. Because this is the moment in which Parliament and country can be reconciled. But if this chance is lost, to-morrow will be too late, and you feel it in the air, you feel it in yourselves. And then, Gentlemen, do not hang on political labels, do not stiffen yourselves in the formal coherence of the parties, do not clutch at bits of straw, as do the shipwrecked in the ocean, hoping vainly to save themselves. But listen to the secret and solemn warning of your conscience; listen also to the incoercible voice of the nation! (The last words of the speech of the Hon. Mussolini, which had been listened to all through with the greatest attention by the Assembly and the Tribunes, are greeted by frantic, repeated applause by the benches of the Right, by the Centre and by many Deputies of the Democratic Left. The ovation lasts for a long time and is intensified by that paid by all the Tribunes. When the applause is over, all the members of the Government shake hands with the President of the Council, while from the benches of the Right all the Deputies come down to congratulate the Hon. Mussolini, amongst them the Hon. Fera, ex-Minister of Justice, and the ex-Prime Ministers, the Hon. Giolitti, the Hon. Salandra, the Hon. Orlando, and the President of the Chamber, the Hon. De Nicola, who exclaims: “It is the finest speech in the annals of Parliamentary history.”) The sitting is suspended for half an hour. When it is resumed at 8.10 the Hon. Mussolini agrees to accept the order of the day proposed by Larussa, viz.: “_The Chamber, reaffirming its confidence in the Government, approves the principles contained in the Electoral Reform Bill, and passes to the discussion of the Articles of the project._”