When he was a Socialist Leader he was struck by the immorality of women and by the cowardice of men. These would lay traps in which other people might lose their lives, as when they unscrewed the rails of the railway in the province of Forli, but they would not risk their own lives. Being at that time, a most orthodox Socialist he could not think: “let us stop this demoralising propaganda.” He believed that it would be all right in the end, when the end, with a capital E, should have come for this capitalist society based as it was on selfishness. He wanted a religion, and having then a mentality quite anti-historical, he really believed that he could give them a new religion if he could but find it. For this would make them realise, so he thought, that they did not count in themselves but only through their relations to others; and that to realise their better self, they must always look at the whole, which is nothing so long as single men are not conscious of belonging to it, but without which they can do nothing to assert their claims as rights and out of which indeed no claim of theirs can really be a right. Obviously, this is man transcending his own self to assert it through the very negation of its empirical nature. It is impossible to insist too much on this point for the new conception of life that was reaching speculative expression in the works of Gentile was here, in this intuitive mind of quite a young man, who knew nothing of Gentilian theories, working its way towards practical realisation. Before the way in which he was to proceed from this to the economic theories that _may_ rid the western world of strikes and lock-outs one fact must be put in evidence. From what has been said above, it is clear that his appreciation of the strength of any collectivity must be based on the degree of consciousness with which the single members realise such collectivity. He had at first not made out the import and the consequences of such a view. But the necessity of pleading his own cause, when he was tried in 1911 by the Tribunal of Forli, for having ordered a strike of protest against the Tripoli war, put on his lips a declaration that must be taken into consideration whenever Mussolini’s “Imperialism” is in question. In the records of the tribunal he is stated to have pleaded his case, saying that he did not love his country less than the Nationalists did; the difference was between his idea of a country’s greatness and theirs. He thought that such greatness depended far more on the spiritual and economic level reached by the people of a country, than on its territorial extension, the number of its inhabitants, or the importance of its colonies. To argue that he has changed his mind on this as on other points would not be consistent with facts. Since his advent to power the efficiency of the army and navy has been brought to a higher standard, but their effective numbers have not been increased