“This consciousness of necessity and liberty inseparably united is found in all men of action, in all political geniuses, who are never inert or reckless: they feel themselves at once bound and not bound; they always conform to facts, but always rise above them. The fatuous, on the other hand, oscillate between the passive acceptance of the given situation and the sterile attempt to overleap it, that is, to leap over their own shadow. They are consequently now inert, now rash. They, therefore, do not fix or conclude anything, they do not act; or, if they do, it is always according to what of the actual situation they have understood, and what of initiative they have displayed.”[8] If Benedetto Croce had been a prophet he could not have better contrasted Mussolini’s way of proceeding, always surrounded by experts and never the slave of data, with the way in which former governments proceeded in Italy, when ministers thought that by the grace of the people they had received some sort of super-natural light to discharge their duty. No practical activity could have been as vigorous as the theoretical reaction of Croce and Gentile against the futility, the abstractness, the pessimism, and above all the materialism that were slowly but surely destroying the third Italy! But their joint philosophical campaign, however brilliant it may have been, could not arouse the working masses to the new gospel of civic life. This had to be undertaken by a man of faith, endowed with the gifts that make the statesman and the popular leader. But the fact that three such men are contemporaries and that without previous arrangement the theoretical activity of the two former coincide with the practical activity of the third is a good argument on behalf of Croce’s theory of the freedom and necessity of man’s action. The situation of fact is the same for all three, and they therefore arise for the same purpose although they endeavour to realise it through very different means.