There we touch what really distinguishes the Fascists from the Nationalists, for whom the State belongs to natural reality, is transcendent in its relation to the individual, and negatively conceived in its relation to other states, where it appears one amongst many. It is a great engine that needs the co-operation of all the citizens to make it work, but it _does_ exist independently of the citizens. Philosophically this conception belongs to the eighteenth century. For the Fascists, the State is not transcendent in its relation to the citizens: it is immanent; it is their own spiritual and economical life in its political summing up. In its relation to other states it is not negatively conceived as one amongst many; for its citizens, it is their national self, whilst the other nations are constitutive of their national non-self. The positiveness of the State for its citizens implies therefore, for them, the negativeness of the other states.[2] Such a conception sounds merely theoretical, and yet it was not born in words. Its painful birth was the outcome of Mussolini’s experience as a Socialist and a party leader. Words have never been given to this newest of all the conceptions that Italy is contributing to the world of politics except in an answer he gave to the judges who, in 1911, were condemning him at Forli. Besides this very curt answer, he never expressed it except in deeds, so that the form under which it is given here is contributed by the author. The rest of the doctrine that can be inferred from his four years’ speeches, legislation and administration, can be traced in the whole of the philosophical works produced by Italian idealism; but this, although perfectly consonant above all with Gentile’s theories, was certainly one of Mussolini’s most original ideas. The task of the government is to raise the level and increase the value of the citizens, attending not to the organisation of every branch of life manifestation, but to the regulation or rather systematisation of such organisation in order to have always the most intimate fusion of state and citizens. The empirical self requires that the peasant should plough his field, sow the seed and reap the harvest. All this he is bound to do to satisfy his material needs and the work thus considered is certainly not ennobling, since man works as the slave of hunger. Fascism says to the peasant: “Thou shalt no longer plough, sow, reap for thyself, that is to say _exclusively for thy material self, but for the State, which is that same empirical self plus its transcendental complement_.” Hence ploughing, sowing and reaping are no longer the work of man, slave of his material needs, but of man transcending them, _without disregarding them_, however, and lifting thereby his daily occupation to the dignity of moral realisation of his own economic value.