Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/24

 I wonder if this is not a point where the Chairman should use his descretion. I am inclined to think that he should, though I hate to start with ruling a question out of order. But let’s reserve it and if we run out of other questions which bear directly on Italy, perhaps we can come back to it.

What would happen in the event of the death of Mussolini?

I think I am going to ask both of the speakers to reply to that.

The craft of prophet is dangerous, but in my opinion if Mussolini dies, there will not be for the moment a great change. As I tried to explain to you, Mussolini is not the creator of the Fascist system. Mussolini is the propagandist of the combine. The combine works on its own account, while Mussolini stands in the limelight gesticulating. So if Mussolini dies, certainly the combine will lose a great propagandist, but they will find a successor to Mussolini until the day when a great crisis occurs in the public life in Italy, and then the Fascisti régime will collapse.

I should not like Mussolini to disappear. As I am strongly anti-Fascist, I wish that Mussolini would live until the moment his system collapses. If Mussolini disappears before the failure of the dictatorship occurs, the Fascist experiment will be robbed of a great part of its value. There will be always in the world a certain number of young boys and retired generals to say "Oh, if Mussolini was alive, Fascism would remain always in power!" Then the failure of the dictatorship would not be the personal failure of the dictator. If the Fascist experiment is to be useful not only to the Italian people but to all humanity, it is necessary that the failure of the dictatorship should occur at the same time as the, failure of the dictator.

This is probably the pivotal point of the difference of opinion between the two official speakers of today. I take, as I have repeatedly expressed, the stand that Mussolini is not the marionette he is elsewhere described as being, but he is the moving power of a movement which I do believe he sponsored to a very great extent, he made popular in Italy, and for which he stands in a much higher rôle than has been described by the other speaker of today.

Therefore, I, for one, feel much more seriously as to what would happen to Italy if Mussolini died. But don't make the usual mistake of thinking that it will mean collapse, or the return to liberalism, or to socialism, which the Italian people have at various times either tested or learned to be afraid of. There will remain Fascism, deprived, however,