His first great move was the reform of education. For him the greatness of a country depended on the consciousness of its citizens. The work was naturally entrusted to Giovanni Gentile, who was the greatest authority on pedagogy. He had to face immense difficulty and he did it with such energy and indomitable will that the educational reform became law and was being applied eleven months after the march on Rome. The main features of it are the re-introduction of religious and moral, æsthetic and practical education in the schools where rational instruction had been paramount for twenty years. This was in accord with modern philosophy, reinstating in their lawful places along with imagination and intuition, all the activities of Mind which had not been duly recognised nor sufficiently developed in the last generations. Religion is understood as the one thing capable of providing man with a reasonable outlook upon life as a whole, with a deep consciousness of his own importance as a factor in the world, and with an equally deep consciousness of his nonentity as soon as he ceases to be part of a whole, and considers himself apart from his relations to his family, to his church, to his school, to his country. Æsthetic education is meant to develop the faculty of realising with great definiteness. The child must not describe in his small essays of ten lines or less something that he cannot draw, and he must not draw something different from that which he describes. “Practical” is a very bad term for the development of judgment in children yet it is the latest word of philosophy which is introduced here. A good deal of the new education in Italy is done through the teaching of history. It may be pointed out, for instance, by the teachers, that Russia has had less importance in the development of civilisation than England or France, though they are so much smaller. This is pointed out as being a proof that the importance of a country has nothing to do either with the area it occupies on the map or with the number of its inhabitants. Athens and Persia may be opposed in the same way. The child is thus gradually brought to realise the creative power of man’s will when it is the “good-will” of the Scriptures. Such will is presented to him as the individual will _with a plus_. That is to say that the man who realises his duty towards his family, his school, country and so on, creates something and thereby is really the collaborator of God.