The state can not be a fact, something already realised. It is the eternal process, the _instauratio regnum boni_ always becoming, and dying to be realised by the consciousness of the individual in its own process of self-realisation. The state is indeed the moral reality of the individual, who to become a citizen realises himself transcending his empirical subjectivity. The state exists only in the hearts of men; it is the intellectual and practical activity of men realising themselves as spiritual reality. It is always being altered through the positive and negative manifestation of man’s moral will. Man is not and cannot be subject to the state, except in so far and in so far only as he is its creator. And creation means liberty no less than self-realisation means realisation of the not-self and therefore the law. CHAPTER X BENITO MUSSOLINI Now that we have traced both the political and philosophical antecedents of what is here called Fascism, since it expresses itself as such, but might perhaps as well be termed the political and philosophical coming of age of Italy as a great nation, we must turn to the man, whose lot it has been to embody such historical forces and bring them to actual realisation. It may seem rather rash to compare Benito Mussolini with Dante and some people may think it a profanation. Poetry and politics put on the same level; a man considered by many little better than an adventurer (and appearing as such in the biography written by a friend of his, Miss M. Sarfatti); the new constitution far from being complete and, Fascist legislation comprising with a very few great laws, a sequence of decrees suggestive of tyranny! Such a comparison must seem to some absurd, although it is a fact that just as Dante embodied in the Divina Commedia all the philosophy, all the arts and politics of mediæval Italy, Mussolini is now embodying in the new régime all that is great and good in modern Italy.