Mussolini, when he was still in his teens, used to sit up late in the inn kept by his father in Forli, and according to a man who used to meet him there, he was even then wont to distress himself at the materialistic form which Socialism had taken in Italy. Day after day he would make the same objection, “It is all right,” he would say, “to better the economic conditions of the people, and you do better them. But I cannot help realising that they are losing more and more the spiritual life which was for them religion and tradition, without taking anything of the higher and nobler side of Socialism.” He had read Andrea Costa’s writings and was devouring the international classics of Socialism, besides his Mazzini, so often quoted by his own father and the Republicans of Forli, who had never read a page of the great idealist. The thought that people were getting more and more indifferent to everything but food or rest, was a nightmare to him. When some twelve years later he became the leader of the Socialist Party in the same town he took up the official attitude of his party against religion. This may be noted in the articles he wrote as the editor of _La Lotta di classe_ during the years 1910–1911. He is an orthodox Socialist, and pours out a lot of anti-religious and even anti-patriotic stuff in a style and with a choice of vocabulary that might befit indifferently an English, a French, or a German Socialist leader of the same period. Here and there, however, a single sentence attracts the careful Italian reader, or the foreigner familiar with all the shades of the language. A personal accent is felt; there is an original idea in an original wording; and it is either a request that the party leaders should be experts and the members qualified artisans; or an appeal highly spiritual, and in a way deeply religious. There are witnesses to the fact that when he had been in the morning issuing an official prohibition of all religious practises he often met in the evening with a theologian to see if there could be a way of re-introducing religion without detriment to Socialism. “For this people,” he would say, “above all the women, _have no conception of life_ at all, since we have deprived them of religion.” It would be, therefore, a profound mistake to see in Mussolini’s attitude towards the Church, and in the action of his government to reinstate religion all through life, a political move, intended to secure the support of the clergy. Religion is not a useful string on which he plays as the great artist he is, either to secure the support of the Catholics and their clergy, or to keep people quiet and insure their moral education. What he realised between 1900 and 1912, through an intuition of genius, is that the people had no general notion whatever, no concept of what is life, never even realised that they could ask themselves such a question as: What is life, what is the world? and that religion was necessary to them.