Page:Giuseppe Bianchini - The Work of the Fascist Government and the Economic Reconstruction of Italy - tr. Luigi Villari.pdf/4

 heroism of the dead, most of them youths who had sacrificed their lives for a noble and wholly disinterested ideal. In 1921 the battle was being fought not only in the country, but in Parliament, which had so deplorably degenerated through the disastrous strife of intriguing groups. It was the handful of Fascists who first raised the standard of revolt against these deplorable methods, and their leader Benito Mussolini on June 21, 1921, under the Giolitti régime, alone of all those who took part in the debate on the reply to the speech from the Throne, spoke out words of warning from the benches of the Extreme Right where no one then dared to sit.

He thus began:

«My speech will be definitely anti-democratic and and anti-Socialist, and when I say anti-Socialist I also mean anti-Giolittian, for never before has there been such a touching interchange of loving correspondance between Sig. Giolitti and the Parliamentary Socialist group as in these days».

That speech was of peculiar significance, because the Fascist leader undertook, to use his own words, «to