Our correspondent continues :- " In a remarkable speech in
the Senate on November 26th Signor Mussolini did not hesitate to unmask certain illusions. A previous speaker had reminded him of the eternal principles of Liberalism. If, he answered, to be a Liberal meant to give forty individuals with no conscience liberty to ruin forty millions of Italians, then he declined to be a Liberal. But party nomenclature left him indifferent. He worshipped no fetish, not even the fetishism of liberty, when the interests of the country were at stake. Liberty had not only rights but also duties. He did not intend to override the laws or the Constitution. But he meant discipline to be something more than a mere word, His policy was not directed against the proletariat. He did not mean to drive the people back to those miserable conditions under which they had formerly lived, but if he contemplated their material and spiritual elevation it was not because he had any belief that numbers would produce special types of civilization in the future. He left such idealities to those who claimed to be the hierophants of such a mystic religion. The reasons for which he sought the well-being of the people were very different, and they arose from national considerations. They were dictated by the logic of facts, by the conviction that a nation could not be united in concord and harmony if twenty million working men were condemned to misery and want. It might however be, nay it was certain, that his policy towards Labour, anti-demagogic if you will, because he could not offer a paradise which was not his to dispose of, would be far more advan- tageous to the mass of the toilers than a policy which had seduced and mystified them to expect in vain the realization of an unsubstantial mirage. The danger of the situation, of course, lies in the fact that SI single man and not an administrative system has become responsible for the destinies of Italy."
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