It is necessary to realise the man and his Dantesque gift for looking at the idea and grasping facts all along, for discharging with personal passion a most impersonal task. It is equally necessary to realise why the people should have wanted him to succeed and give him that support without which his genius would have aborted as a sterile longing for action. According to Croce the act of will of any single man becomes an event and is granted success according to the way in which it stands to the will of the whole, and to the actual situation of fact. Macchiavelli, it must be borne in mind, tried to do with his Tuscan militia what Mussolini has achieved, and he only succeeded in realising how out of keeping with the times his scheme had been. Sadly, this forerunner of Mussolini, not inferior to him in genius or reading, had to sit down and write what the regenerator of Italy would have to do, the necessity of governing in harmony with the times and according to the actual truth of circumstances being one of the principles ever recurring under his pen. “Everyone knows,” says Benedetto Croce, who is by no means a Fascist, in the _Philosophy of the Practical_, printed for the first time in 1908, “that no _vultus instantis tyranni_ can extinguish the freedom of the soul; no ruler, be he ever so strong and violent, can prevent a rebellion.” If people choose to use the word tyrant in the Greek sense of the word they may call Mussolini a tyrant, for he is and will be an unconstitutional ruler until the new institutions are so framed, that the new régime can function normally. But if it is implied by that, as the modern sense of the word allows, that he rules against the people’s will it is merely absurd, and one single fact could prove the contrary. When two years ago he asked that a certain sum should be subscribed in dollars towards the paying to the United States War Debt, the issue was many times what he had asked. It would not be true to facts to omit that although it was not compulsory, there was a good deal of moral pressure made to get the people to subscribe. But surely they did not need to cover it so many times and the excess was indeed most spontaneously subscribed. The people of Italy do grumble at many things which are done by the Fascists, and anybody would do so. It is mainly, however, individual actions which are the object of complaint and not laws or public services. For it must be kept in mind that the actual form of Mussolini’s government has been called into being by the misgovernment or rather non-government of the people who preceded him in power, and the country felt the need of being governed in one way or another.