Mussolini’s belief was that you could make man realise that, if he is the centre of the universe, he is so through his relation to the universe, but that you could not do this by words. The only way to make men realise that selfishness, when it becomes absolute is bound to reduce society to atomistic irrelativeness and thereby to anarchy, was, according to him, _action_. If a body of men were ready to do, through coherent action and sacrifice of their individual wills, what the government ought to have done, then the people would know that they could cease from being bullied by the Bolshevist Socialists and followers of Don Sturzo, provided they were willing to sacrifice their individual wills, as the men of a team of football do when they want to win a match. He felt sure that he could call his countrymen to the sacrifice of life and to the acceptance of the harshest discipline if they could but be induced to cease centring their whole mind upon their precious selves. There was, however, no time to organise a religious revival; and his knowledge of men provided him with the one intuition that could be acted upon at the time. He called on them to defend the value of their own sacrifice in the trenches and in the field. Now that was not cold and distant as the idea of the nation might have proved; it was quite real to them and moved them consequently as nothing else could. Through the action of a few hundreds several hundreds of thousands were induced to fight for the defence of what had been their former action. The fighting however was only on a very small scale and mostly in the provinces where the tyranny of the Reds and Whites had to be broken; the breaking up of that tyranny made the people look upon the Black Shirts as their liberators. Peasant women and children were once more free to go to Church, officers and wounded men were once more free to go about in their uniforms without being attacked or insulted, workmen were once more free to attend their daily work and earn their money as they liked. The Fascists did not have to fight their way to power. They merely took it and were cheered on to taking it. * * * * * As soon as Mussolini was in power he was asked by his ministers what his programme was. He curtly answered “that it was to realise the full value of Italy’s sacrifice in the war.” He had no political programme and was so indifferent to party distinctions that he took ministers from every party, choosing them only according to their qualification as experts. What he required from them was the maximum of efficiency, and the maximum also of personal responsibility.