It has been shown in the first part of this book why Italy was not governed at all, why no public service could work effectively, why foreign policy had to be so inferior to the real position of the country, why the beautiful peninsula had fallen into a state bordering on anarchy. It is difficult for an Englishman to realise how a country could fall into such conditions. England has five or six centuries of political experience, a length of time more than sufficient to produce electors and representatives able to realise what are the duties of the executive as well as those of the legislature. Everybody in England is familiar with the process through which political forms come into being. People struggle to reach a certain form of government and that moment of dialectic ends when the form is reached; they then apply it more and more fully and during its application discover its limitations; this second movement ends in criticism of the whole thing; finally, people set themselves to remedy its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the full consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied. Thus the people learn to use a new form whilst they are using, then discarding, the one that came before it. In Italy nothing of the sort happened. The political leaders would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was considered “social progress.” The immediate aftermath of the war in Italy was as we have seen morally a tragedy. It seemed as if something had died, something spiritual. Everything seemed to be going to pieces. Nobody seemed to think, nobody seemed to realise that moral forces, a national consciousness had been produced by the general sacrifice. A few heroes were watching over the flame lit up in the young souls who had learned truth in the bitter experience of war. They were very few indeed, and they could only get a hearing through the actual violence with which they fell on the old political classes, who were intent on convincing the people that the war had to be forgotten as a nightmare, that man must forget it as soon as possible to throw himself again into his pursuit of material well-being. Whatever the smallness of their number—when Mussolini founded the first _Fascio_ in 1919 they were 150—they were enough to arouse a deep echo in the youth of Italy, which was beginning both for spiritual and practical reasons to conceive life as an energy, a force, a consciousness transcending the limits set by the interests of the individual, bound to upset violently the quiet and selfish life of the man intent on the satisfaction of his most empirical desires. * * * * *