Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/15

 Let's be fair about it—the average individual has lost that basic confidence in his government that makes one say, when the tax bill is received, "I am so happy that I have an oportunity of showing to the government how much I love it." The average human being no longer has that sense of utter devotion, that freshness of attitude toward his government which his forefathers had. But I have not time to discuss the modern plight of democracies.

I am holding no brief for the denial of elementary liberties which Fascism has brought about. I am discussing the Italy which emerged as she did in 1922 from a state of absolute anarchy which had followed the demoralizing influence of the war. And you may accuse the war itself of this demoralizing influence; I grant that. Hardly had Austria collapsed when vast masses of Italians flocked home from Austrian prisons, hardly anybody knowing what to do with them, how to receive them. How many were bona fide prisoners, how many "strikers" of Caporetto? When the Caporetto disaster happened, those people wanted to get away; now, on the contrary, they were being welcomed back and no questions asked. I grant that. But a real government would have stepped in. The liberals, on the contrary, preferred not to see. Result, the Fascisti had, with their vehement methods, to bring order out of chaos. Some of you find fault with that vehemence. Please be fair: take your share of the blame. Those early Fascisti were all war veterans—shock troops of that Italian army which America allowed to go on fighting unaided on the Alps. You insisted on sending all your boys to France. But these boys had passed through three and a half years of terrific war against a military power greater than Italy, on the Alps on which no real war was ever fought before. It meant no poison gas, no tanks, no large caliber guns, no Big Berthas; it meant in practically all cases the pocket knife, the hand grenade, the bayonet, the things that show to an individual what it means to kill another man. You who are seeing day after day a number of veterans of the World War filling Sing Sing prison now because they have forgotten how to respect human life ought to be very generous and broad-minded toward a people who have been made to fight practically alone a war against the combination of a Power greater than Italy, and Nature as represented by the formidable barrier of the Alps.

And what have those boys done since they took charge in Italy? I regret to say that the statistics in which I thought I would indulge (for only five, however, of the few minutes that have been allotted to me) have been thoroughly discredited by the statement made before that statistics are the fourth degree of lying; therefore, not wishing to submit official data to that stigma, I shall not of course give any time to them, but refer my hearers to the mass of data printed in America concerning the practical achievements of Fascismo.