This was new indeed, too new for a generation which had achieved the political independence of the country with the belief that bad government and foreign rule were the cause of the people’s corruption. No wonder, therefore, that de Sanctis’ masterpiece, published in 1871, should have been practically laid aside for more than twenty-five years awaiting Croce and Gentile to take it up. The public that responded to their call when it came was exactly the one which de Sanctis would have wished to reach. The boys took de Sanctis up, and what is more curious they took him as their idea-provider; inasmuch as the big volumes, which could not be included in the schools’ syllabus, were turned to in the hour of need, when they had to write essays and found themselves short of ideas. No method of popularising and assimilation could match this, for the ideas thus borrowed by the young had to be exposed, proved and illustrated. The school lads and university men who enlisted as volunteers in the war, were mostly spiritual sons of de Sanctis, one of them being Mussolini, who told the author that he was a worshipper of that work. In the same way the idea of Croce and Gentile have spread even among people unfit to realise their theoretical import. Never, however, could they spread like those of de Sanctis, but he is so much so completely their spiritual father that most of their speculative notions can be found as intuitions in de Sanctis’ pages. There the boys get so familiar with them that when they come to a Gentilian theory, and the teacher takes the trouble to introduce to them the fundamental intuition, they grasp it at once as a matter of course and wonder why the teacher should think it so difficult to explain, for instance, the intimate relation of thought and action, the necessity of religion and the like. CHAPTER VIII BENEDETTO CROCE Benedetto Croce’s opposition to Mussolini’s government is so well known that to include him among the precursors of Fascism may seem strange. But here Fascism is considered as the political expression of the intellectual or rather spiritual forces which are bringing Italy to the fore and determining the growth of the Italian mind. Hence the necessity of including Croce in this account of the pedigree of the tendencies which have been realised in politics by Benito Mussolini. This naturally does not imply that all the ideas acted upon by Fascists are to be found in the theories of Croce, but that certain needs of Italian minds, more or less consciously expressed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had been formulated and worked out by Croce, who had either found them in de Sanctis or had developed them on lines suggested to him by that great critic.