It may be held, in fact, that political deeds do express the life of minds just as forcibly as poetry, therefore that they do not stand in a position of æsthetic inferiority to the compositions of poets, unless one chooses to compare the politics of a decadent period to the poetry of a great period. It may also be held that “adventurer” is an epithet that befits better the Duce of Miss Sarfatti than the Uomo Novo of Antonio Beltramelli, in whose book the same Duce appears as the herald of an entirely new period of the life of Italy. And the present book is concerned exclusively with what may prove of lasting value in the laws of the government of Mussolini, and does not imply an approval of what may be objectionable in the actual methods of government; it takes the view that tyrannical decrees and the like are inherent in the revolutionary stage of the régime and temporary measures bound to disappear when that stage has been outgrown. Our sensible souls may be shocked when we feel the violence of the hatred with which Dante pursues his enemies right into Hell or Purgatory. Mussolini’s soul is just as sensible and modern as our own. Not only would he forbear from hating his dead adversaries, but he does not hate his enemies even during their life. He can speak of them with the greatest serenity and recall the time when they were his friends without losing his sense of fair appreciation. He can compare with Dante for the violence of his hostility only when hostile attacks are directed against his task and are an impediment to him and his men in what he considers the work laid down for them by Providence. But this is stretching too far a comparison which has been made merely to explain the impossibility of giving good grounds for the fact that Mussolini was the one man fit to realise in politics all the theoretical ideas and practical tendencies that have been traced in this work. Such facts are as mysterious as the nature of genius. Yet it may not be out of place to note that both Dante and Mussolini have the same love of learning and just too much intuition to contribute to the theoretical life of mind; and that the contrast which exists between some inferior passages of the Divina Commedia and those that make it an immortal poem is not greater than that which exists between what is objectionable in Mussolini’s way of ruling and that which is likely to be of eternal value in the ideals that underlie the whole of his political thought of action.