In 1915 such an excellent jurisconsult as Prof. Salandra and such a first-rate diplomat as Sonnino seemed to realise but little that such a principle existed. At best they harped on Trento and Trieste, when they did not display their rhetoric on the conflict between civilisation and barbarity. Still this territorial conquest, whatever its importance as a traditional ideal to realise, was presented above all as a rectification of the northern frontiers strictly necessary for the safety of the nation and ethnologically justified. Nobody ever seemed to realise that this aim should not have been the first objective to a nation which lacked that which is the very essence of the national entity, that which entitles a collectivity to have ethnological frontiers, in short a national conscience and a national will. Nobody seemed to realise it, but there was one man who did, and there we have the second flare of genius to be credited to Mussolini. He had become gradually conscious through constant contact with the working class, and the middle class as well, that they would never be fit for political life unless they acquired what they lacked through sacrifice. The recent Red Week had shown him that they would not fight, that they might set traps for other people’s lives, but they would not face either blows or death for anything; and when the war came he saw that there Italy had the one chance it could have to acquire what the genial people who called themselves its citizens lacked to lift themselves into the higher sphere where human beings are prepared to live and to die for their political ideas. It is, in fact, this national conscience, this spiritual and, therefore, unlimited gift that the war has bestowed upon Italy, and it is only now that Carducci, the most typically civic of all Italian poets, could write with perfect truth: “Ei dipinga il trionfo dell ’Italia Assorta novella tra le genti.”