Mussolini’s speech at the “Comunale” temporarily reunited the sane sections of Bologna to the rest of Italy, then in great anxiety for her fate and future. Combatants and Citizens! Will you allow me to pass over without unnecessary delay the polemics which preceded my coming to this city? If, as says our great poet Carducci, “one does not seek for butterflies beneath the arch of Titus,” one does not seek for them either beneath the arches of this, our ancient and magnificent town of Bologna, especially as one would probably not find butterflies at all, but bats dazed and frightened by this glorious May sunshine. The form of my speech will not surprise you. In those days, three years ago, all the Italy that was conscious of life and possessed of will-power, the only Italy which has a right to transform her chaotic succession of events into history, burned with an intense ardour—our ardour. I have noticed now for some time that there are opportunists who are trying to open a door for eventual responsibilities and who are carefully and laboriously cataloguing the reasons why Italy could not remain neutral. _Destiny and Will._ Very well! I admit that there has been fatality, I admit this compulsion, which was the result of a number of causes which it is useless to dwell upon, but I add that at a certain moment we imprinted the mark of our will upon this concatenation of events, and to-day, after three years, we are not penitent of what we have done. We leave this weak, spiritual attitude to those who seek applause, seats in Parliament, and personal satisfaction; those who thoroughly despise, as I do, all parliamenteering and demagogism, are far away from all this. What Machiavelli says in chapter vi. of the _Principe_, about those who, by their own inherent qualities, attained the position of princes, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus, can be applied not only to the individual, but to the nation. “And examining,” says the Florentine Secretary, “their lives and actions, one does not see that they had other fortune than that of the opportunity which gave them the material and enabled them to shape it as seemed best to them; and without that opportunity the virtue of their souls would have been lost, and without that virtue the opportunity would have come in vain.” As to the Italian people in that glorious May, it can be said that without the opportunity of the war the virtue of our people would have been lost; but without this virtue the opportunity of the war would have come in vain.