Without following any further this method of investigation let us define Fascism as the introduction of a new conception of the relation between State and Citizen, a new conception of political reality. It is, therefore, a doctrine, a system, and as such is philosophy expressing itself in history. This admitted, it is necessary to guard against the abstract bent. of philosophical researches. The deepest currents of speculative thought would never bring about a single change of government by themselves; but then they do not exist by themselves. It is only in the synthesis of history that we find them at play in the world of historical reality, which is what it is because thoughts and deeds are one. The March on Rome did certainly mark the confluence of two streams coming to mingle their waters between the banks of the Tiber. One was torrential, the impulse coming from a fifty years’ accumulation of economic and political mistakes in Italy. The other was deeper, slower, the contribution of centuries of Italian philosophy enriched by the intellectual thought of all Europe. The torrent is represented by the political antecedents of Fascism: the deep stream by the philosophical antecedents of Fascism. To illustrate my figure a period of history presents itself as an example. It does not correspond exactly to the present movement in Italy, but it is at any rate familiar to one and all: the French Revolution. We see there, also, the typical stream of philosophical life carving a deep bed for the river to come: in the minds of intellectuals, in the consciousness of the people, abstract theories or works of artistic vulgarisation, prepare the bed for the river that will become, under the impulsion of actual circumstances, an irresistible torrent. So that this revolution whose intellectual pedigree makes it the offspring of Descartes, and Hobbes, of Grotius, Locke and the English political writers, besides the Encyclopædists, Voltaire and Rousseau, has to the highest degree the qualities that make it an element of universal life, and a fertilising principle in the politics of all Europe. On the other hand it receives, undoubtedly from the economic and political conditions of France, the particular determinations that distinguish it as French, as belonging to the eighteenth century. The form it took actually between 1790 and 1795 could not be introduced anywhere else; under that form it was exclusively French, because—we must insist on the point—it had received it as its actual and concrete determination from its immediate antecedents.