This brings our study to a conclusion, since to deal with any one point of those which have been merely sketched here would require a whole volume. The people’s will is free so long as what they wish is for the common good and their own good, but it is not free to want anything that is either not for the common good or against it. Football is still the best example. The men of a team freely want to win the match and freely do what they are ordered to do by their captain, but they are not free to show off or to spoil the game, to spite the captain or any one of the men. Mussolini makes no mystery about it; his party has come into the world as the negation of the Rights of Man as they were formulated in the eighteenth century; as the negation of Liberty as it has been understood, that is to say abstracting it from its correlative term Law; as the negation of democracy as far as democracy is understood, through a wrong interpretation of its Greek root taking people as equivalent to lower class, is quantity opposed to quality—whereas it is equivalent to the nation as a whole; as the negation of the equality of 1789 which was materially and mechanically conceived. Yet such negations are the preliminary stage to affirmations—the affirmation of the rights of man _arising from his consciousness of duty_; of liberty as the positive term of Law, yet as inseparable from it as light from shadow; of democracy understood as the impossibility of any class willing to rule by force over other classes, be it by the force of wealth, arms, or numbers; finally, the equality of men, both moral and legal, according to which every man’s rights must be proportioned to what he does for the community. The great new feature of it is the idea of state and citizen upon which the whole Mussolinian legislation and government is based although it seems never to mention it. Whilst in the Anglo-Saxon and French views of political reality the State is a function of the citizen; whilst in the German view, whether in its Imperialistic or Communistic form, the citizen is a function of the state, for modern Italy the state is the consciousness of the citizen transcending itself and postulating itself in religious objectivity. No class differences, no financial differences may therefore be rendered permanent by the State. No care must be spared that may ensure their eternal mutability. Differences are necessary to permit moral, social, and economic progress; but their fertility lies in their elasticity. If “Avanti” was not the motto of Socialism the Fascists could make it theirs; as it is, reintroducing faith and belief at the basis of man’s life they seem to point to higher moral, political and economical conquests. The only motto that can befit the black shirts movement is therefore _Sursum corda_. [ FOOTNOTES ]