The common people, one cannot insist too much upon the fact, remained indifferent at best, and that only as long as their interests were not affected; the lower middle class were hostile, that is to say the shop people and all the multitude of small functionaries who saw their daily bread dependent on the existing state of things, were openly against any change. How could such people feel the need or see the possibility of building up a nation, one nation, out of the harlequin coat presented by the map of Italy? Thus a free hand was guaranteed to the small number of Italian gentlemen then endowed with heroic souls. They had nobody to consult, they were a State in themselves, a State without a lower class. Perhaps for the last time in the history of the world we see there realised the classical republic without a political plebs. No wonder that they worked a miracle; they belonged politically to different states, and yet by the force of their ideal they attained that oneness of conscience which gives personality and reality to a nation. The spirit of the nation existed before its material realisation; there is no better illustration of the new notion that Fascism is bringing to the fore in the world of concrete history, that of the nation as a spiritual reality, independent of geographical and ethnographical determinations. Never in history has this notion received a more complete and actual realisation than in this first dawn of the national life in Italy. The reality of the nation had its first affirmation in the sacrifice of these men, for it is obvious that no sober man would give up life, liberty, wealth, for something unreal; and, in fact, the reality of Italy as a nation ceased to be questioned then and there. Every advantage, of course, has its disadvantage. As the pioneers of the Risorgimento did not need the people, they overlooked all the problems that the necessity of obtaining popular collaboration would have compelled them to face. All economic and social questions were overlooked except by a very few; the spiritual education of the lower class was not even suggested in their programme of action. Their aims were the independence and the political unity of Italy, and to that goal they directed their hearts and minds indifferent to the needs of practical life, and to all the obstacles that seemed to make their dream a theme for the lyrical effusions of poets. In fact they were poets, all of them, for they created a reality out of an ideal vision that was more an intuition than an intellectual conception. The very manner in which they carried out their revolution was æsthetic more than practical; they shut their eyes to all that was in contradiction to their dream, exactly as the artist does who strives to express an intuition through material realisation, and in order not to let the objective world crowd his mind deliberately shuts his eyes to it, to everything that is not his present ideal.