But this is anticipating Mussolini’s realisation of the fact, and it may be sufficient to state that Croce’s ideas, stated here together, were scattered explicitly in several essays published between 1897 and 1900, and collected for the first time in 1907 while they were implicitly pervading the whole of his own writings and those of innumerable journalists as well as running on the lips of the Professors who taught in upper schools and universities. On this point of the essential mutability of laws and institutions, Croce lays a great stress. “We often meet in history with projects of new laws which are said to be better than the old, or good by comparison with those judged more or less bad, the new ones being proposed as _natural_ or _rational_ justice, whilst the old ones are rejected as unnatural or irrational, just as passionate erotic temperaments, uninstructed by the experience of their past, believe with the utmost seriousness that their new love will be constant and eternal. Such ‘Natural laws’ are historical, are transitory, like all others. All men know how, in certain times, and places, religious tolerance, freedom of trade, private property, constitutional monarchy, have been proclaimed eternal, and in other times and places the extirpation of unbelievers, commercial protection, communism, the republic and anarchy.”[9] From what has been said it might be taken that Croce has been merely destroying the religious reverence of his countrymen for the actual apparel of law. Nothing can be farther from truth. His contention was that laws being manifestations of man’s will must change with the changes in facts. The ideas of the eighteenth or nineteenth century can no longer be a living reality. The reality which he denies to the law itself he recognises as belonging to the single act done under the law, that is to say to the execution of the law. The indubitable truth, as to the necessity of acting in each case according to historical necessities, has induced people at different times and in different places, to proclaim the sheer uselessness of law. Benedetto Croce is most definitely against such theories. According to him, the best arguments to be used against them can be drawn from history itself, and if they do not rigorously demonstrate the necessity of laws they show well enough that such necessity has been generally felt in all lands and in all times. The necessity of laws, ordinances, justice, and the state, appears at all points of human history. Better a bad government than no government at all; and those who declaim against laws can well do so at their ease, for the law surrounds, protects, and preserves their life for them. CHAPTER IX GIOVANNI GENTILE