Part V: The Return of the Romans

THE RETURN OF THE ROMANS igi

I HAPPEN to be so constituted that I can enjoy almost any weather, except what is called glorious weather. But I also have a dim feeling of resentment, when this sort of weather is alone accounted glorious. I can understand that the word might not naturally be applied to the condition of climate I happen to enjoy most; which is, broadly speaking, the climate of my own country. It is the sort of cool and brisk grey weather, which is felt as appropriate to early winter or very early spring and the complaint of my ungrateful countrymen merely consists of saying that it is quite as common in summer and appears to last all the year round. But I can quite understand that it costs them an effort to call it glorious. But one season, like one star, differs from another in glory; and I do not admit that the only star is that which we call the sun. Similarly, I know not why even Pagans, in this once Pagan city, should reserve all their worship for Apollo; or forget that there is a planet called Jupiter in the skies or a god called Jupiter on the Capitol. My experience of weather in Rome, in the late autumn, is that it is emphatically glorious weather, in the sense of godlike weather, but not only because Phoebus still blazes from the firmament, but also because Jove can still thunder from the rock. Rain in Rome is a truly glorious thing. I do not wonder that they worshipped Jupiter under the name of Jupiter Pluvius. It is at the opposite extreme from the rain that hangs about indecisively over the Atlantic islands. It is the reverse of that Celtic Twilight the Scots call soft weather. Here, even in the heart of a great city, rain while it lasts is exceedingly hard weather. It rings on all the stone and metal like something metallic; like something harder than hail. One might easily imagine that it was really a crash of thunderbolts, hurled by the old heathen god from his Capitoline throne; by that dark and mysterious Sky-Father to whom, after every victory, the Romans returned. Indeed the vivid and sometimes abrupt alternations of late but strong sunshine with storm and rain and even cold may throw some light, for all I know, on those endless myths of the men of the Mediterranean about celestial powers in conflict and the rivalry of the gods. But there is a further effect of these conditions which has a closer reference to the history of Rome. I do not need to be told that the sky is astonishing everywhere and should alone keep all men from materialism or indifference; that sunsets purple with passion illuminate Pimlico or apocalyptic daybreaks cry aloud and in vain to West Ealing. But, being myself much travelled in these realms of gold, I have never for some reason seen a modern city in which the sky seemed so continuously significant as in Rome. It may be connected, like most Roman things, with some reading of the traditional into the actual. But I do not think this is entirely the case. There are hours of evening when a red sunset stands behind the dome of St. Peter’s like a Cardinal in all his robes, unwrinkled, unstained, untouched by any spot of cloud, the sky more solid than the land. There are other times when the sky seems filled with fragments, jagged and detached, as if another world had been broken in space. And it is impossible not to recall, at such a moment, the long inheritance of legend which has so repeatedly accompanied the Roman story with a story of signs in heaven; or to forget the meteors that blazed forth the death of Caesar or that rending of the secret skies, which was seen by the Evangelist above the City of the Seven Hills.

I was leaning over the wall of the Pincio Gardens, and below me there was nothing but a fall of steps and a fringe of palm-trees, deserted except for one of the ordinary civic guards standing and gazing across the valley. There had recently been a spouting storm of rain and the whole scene was bright with the tiny mirrors of water. But the sky was still filled with floating wrecks of cloud lit from below by the last light from the now wan and lurid day. The hot and heavy storm that hangs indecisively above Rome in autumn took the form, for the moment, of something like a strange configuration of the sky; and, for some unreasonable reason, it was behind this, and not more solemn scenes and figures, that there seemed to pass vaguely an emblematic pageant of the past. To say that in such a reverie the dreamer saw the long story of Rome would naturally be a lie; like the well-established lie about the retrospect of the drowning man, which no properly drowned man has ever come back either to claim or contradict. But the drowning man, like the dreaming man, may possibly see what we all see in moments of surprise or abstraction or driving haste; symbolic shapes like mere scraps taken at random and referring in some fashion to a longer catalogue. And it was at that moment, and in that lurid dusk, for some reason, that I fancied I saw disconnected and dreadful things that had happened long ago appearing in the sky like omens; and especially those that had really been seen, as old traditions told, against the sky; the black birds of aboriginal augury and the shield falling from heaven; and the starry signs of evil which

THE RETURN OF THE ROMANS ig5

Livy recorded; and the spear of Hannibal hurtling above Rome and hung in heaven like one of the thunderbolts of Jove; and the ensigns going up the rock of the Capitol; and that yellow giant burning in the sun that was the colossal figure of the greatest of earthly tyrants; and high in heaven the holy place whose name alone suggests a cloudy altar in the sky; and Simon the Magician hung in the void like a star and falling like a stone; and in the long battering sieges the great gesturing statues of the Caesars hurled through the sky like huge stone arrows upon the heads of the Goths; and so through a thousand stages of a story that has been one everlasting storm. For at every stage of the story of Rome, Pagan and Christian, it has been accompanied, men say, by signs in heaven; but I know not why they should have thus crowded upon my own fancy in that casual connection. Everyone knows how in such a sky, which is sown with shards and shattered fragments of cloud, it is easy to fancy half a hundred figures or significant shapes, sometimes of almost incredible solidity and similarity; and it was not unnatural to find in such a cloudland the flying wizard or the falling god. All the clouds were drifting very slowly across the dome, but as I looked at one small dark clot of cloud, I saw with a subconscious thrill that it was moving faster than the rest. Indeed it was soon moving like an arrow; and I saw that it was an aeroplane. And something in this now familiar object seemed new and unfamiliar, as it rose through the clearing skies beyond the last rags of the storm. This Icarus was after all the last phase of Italy and the end of the long string of portents, that ended with the flying ship as it began with the falling shield. And there swept through my mind as with a rush of such winged chariots, the tales of Fiume and the fight; and over Austria the avenging aviators; and all that Mr. Squire has truly called the demoniacal courage of D’Annunzio. Nobody can doubt that Italy of the ages is alive, who remembers the legend that is alive with eagles, and the strong riders of the Renaissance, and then thinks of that wild poet pouring fire from heaven; a man dangerous in peace and war. We need not accept all aspects of such a man, any more than of Benvenuto Cellini; but the man is the same and is still alive. And from this last of the signs in heaven my mind went slowly backwards to the vast and titanic tragedy which occasioned all such courage, and out of which at last Italy has come transfigured. I thought of my own country and the heroic and heartening part she played in the Great War; and the strange taste for unheroic and disheartening literature that has since been cultivated in her reading public. And as I would rather rejoice

THE RETURN OF THE ROMANS x<)J with the triumph of Italians than defile myself with the belated despair of German Jews, I turned to the consideration of that colossal combat; and especially of the reverberations of it in the hills of Rome.

What was the Great War? There are broadly four fundamental theories which make some sort of historical sense, apart from newspaper nonsense. It will be well to state them first as clearly and fairly as possible; if sense and not nonsense is to direct our view of post-war Italy. Of these four theories I myself hold the fourth. I know it is the one that is least held and least understood. I am prepared to prove here that it is the only one which makes any sense of what has actually happened.

The first interpretation is roughly that of the rivalry of the British Empire and the German Empire. There is up to a point, of course, a truth in this. For some time past there had been between the Prussian and the British systems a curious rage of imitation; an acrid anger of mutual admiration. There was so complete an agreement that every shrewd person knew that it would end in disagreement. England had been in a phase of boasting about her Empire and Germany in a phase of envying that Empire. Both agreed that possessing colonies of a certain sort, commerce of a certain sort, and naval strength of a certain sort, were the things to be envied. There was another side to the mutual flattery, which led to the mutual fury; and I shall mention it in a moment. But it is well to realise that there went along with all the arrogance of Prussia a queer sort of barbarous admiration for the modern Imperialism of Great Britain. The ordinary German was taught to reconcile his arrogance with his admiration by means of the silly schoolmaster’s fairy-tale about the Teutonic Race. The Englishman and the German were brothers; like Cain and Abel. That was one theory of the primary passions of the War. But apart from anthropological antics about Teutonism, it is well to note that Prussia had from of old this antic of imitation. Frederick the Great was a French king though a Prussian squire. His whole plan of palace, camp and city was on the French pattern; he did not even speak German. Just as Frederick fought the French from bitter admiration of their army, so William fought the British from bitter admiration of their navy. In both cases there was the same foreign fashion inflaming local ambition. The favourite author of Wilhelm the Second was Kipling; just as the favourite author of Frederick the Second was Voltaire. The world has grown steadily less and less international (though the internationalists are vexed when told so) and it was impossible for the Kaiser to ask Mr. Kipling to come and live at his palace or even in his kingdom, as Frederick had asked Voltaire. The Kaiser had to be content with the estimable Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom most of us (possibly excepting Dean Inge) are less likely to miss. But there was this element of fierce flattery, of hard and hostile plagiarism; and it must count for something. On the other side, even before the simple German had been taught to take the British Empire seriously, the equally simple Briton had been taught to take the Germanic race seriously. In all the schools and universities Englishmen were taught to be proud of being Germans; actually, in so many words, of being a certain sort of Saxon. Everything German was held up to incessant admiration up to the very moment of the War. Some of us expected that if the English and the Germans went on admiring each other like this, there would certainly be war. We even endeavoured to introduce a little disagreement and difference, in the hope of keeping the peace. We tried to point out that the Englishman and the Prussian were really rather remote from each other, and might well go their very separate ways. We pointed out, for instance, that even the English weakness, the excessive worship of the gentleman, cut him off from the North German; for the Prussian aristocrat, in the

English sense, is not a gentleman at all. He is on principle stiff, stingy and brutal, instead of being genial, generous and patronising. Thus, we tenderly pointed out, there is a basic distinction even between a nation of snobs and a nation of serfs. With such soothing and reconciling words did we attempt to persuade the English and the Germans that they were not so frightfully similar as to be bound to kill each other; that there was quite enough contrast to allow them to live side by side in peace. But all such feeble reassurances were drowned in the deafening generalisation about the Germanic Race; which was apparently the same as the Race for Empire. Everybody in England seemed ready for the first or Anglo-German theory of war; the theory of Rivalry. Rivalry is the war between two things, not because they are different but because they are alike.

Allowing reasonable weight to this first theory, we may pass on to the second. In this also there is a truth; indeed of the two I think it is the truer. Anyhow it is roughly this. So far from being a rivalry between two similar things, it was the recurrence of an unending duel between two deeply dissimilar things; popularly represented by the words French and German. It may reasonably be said that they are the only two things in Europe that have never been heartily friendly and at one. The English way of putting it is that the war was the return match for 1870. It is a very English way of putting it; for the sporting metaphor implies a geniality that is not German and a frivolity that is not French. The French way of putting it, we were always told, was to talk about Revanche. And this again was a very French way of putting it; for it was making it out much worse than it was. There is always in the Frenchman a touch of that bitterness that is bitter against itself; and he was quite ready to say he was only asking for revenge, when in fact he was only asking for justice. If Prussia had defeated us and taken away Yorkshire and Lancashire to add to the German Empire, we should not have exposed ourselves to misunderstanding by asking for " revenge.” There is in the same case, as part of the same spirit, the invariable habit of the French of talking more about their failures than their successes. It has been truly said "they are tenacious of the memory of defeats rather than victories.” All French literature begins with a song of defeat, of the fall of Roland in the Pyrenean pass, and it is French art as much as any that has fixed in our imagination that figure, who had a hundred blazing victories to his name, as if he rode huddled and frozen for ever on an endless road from Moscow. In this, as in the parallel passion for crying out against political betrayal, the French are for good and evil the very opposite of the English. The English do not lament over lost battles, for the simple reason that they are never allowed to hear of any. A Frenchman knows well enough what is meant by Agincourt or Blenheim or Leipzig. “ Waterloo ” is the name of a whole long poem by Victor Hugo; and one of the lightest and most popular of the songs or jingles, familiar to French children, commemorates the fact that the great Duke of Marlborough goes to war. But say to an Englishman “ Orleans; Steenkirk; Fontenoy; Turcoing; Toulon ”; and no wrath will kindle in his eye, for he has never so much as heard of a single one of these English defeats. In this sense it is true that a tradition of Revanche, or the righting of old wrongs, counted for something in the European quarrel, and that the French would certainly have recovered the stolen French provinces whenever they could; and quite right too. According to this second theory, their diplomacy had been patiently, intelligently and intensely directed to this end; they had succeeded in obtaining first an alliance with Russia, and later an understanding with England; and that, even if the actual aggression came from Germany, it did not come until France had succeeded in encircling her with foes. This theory is true, in the sense that France was probably the most fully conscious and concentrated and intellectually convinced of the Allies; and of all the millions of brave men of many bloods and creeds, who perished in that awful depopulation, it was her sons who least doubted for what they died.

The third theory is more remote and in a sense more mysterious, and has the grave disadvantage of having little or nothing to do with us. According to this theory, we of the West, the British and even the French, were hanging on to the edge of the affair, almost like those others of the East, the Japanese or the Sepoys. The centre of the War was in the centre. It pivoted on the Central Powers and the notion of Mittel-Europa; or, in other words, upon the war frontier between Austria and Russia. It was the Slav against the Teuton; especially it was Pan-Slavism against Pan-Germanism. For that reason, it might well be said, the whole business began in the Balkans. For that reason it began with a provocative ultimatum from Austria to Serbia. For that reason, it might be argued, the civilised and patriotic state of Poland stood somewhat detached and doubtful; treated best by Austria and worst by Prussia. The Pole is the least Slav of the Slavs. Anyhow, he is the least Pan-Slav of the Slavs. He is a patriot on the Western pattern, and cares about a nation and not a race But over all the rest of that vast inland continent were only vague and uncharted realms of race and religion; but especially religion. And in a manner less clear-cut than the West understands, there stood facing each other two vast powers or cultures; at the head of one of which stood, in the main, the White Czar of all the Russias; and, at the head of the other the Emperor of that patchwork Empire held together by Vienna; the last of the Holy Roman Empire, still claiming the crown of Charlemagne. It might be an exaggeration to call it, as if out of some page of Gibbon, a war between the Eastern and the Western Caesar. But it did count enormously in the matter that millions of those nomadic and nationless populations knew of no real difference, except that one followed the Byzantine and the other the Roman rite. Anyhow, that is roughly the third conception, and as I say, there is something in it, mysterious and for us hard to measure. For over everything connected with Russia, or even the New Rome of Constantine, there is flung, faint but vast, something that is not ourselves; the shadow of Asia.

I can believe in supernatural explanations, but not in unnatural natural explanations. I can accept a miracle if it is proved, or even sometimes when it is not proved; but I cannot accept an ordinary practical event which ought to be proved and is not even probable. I could believe that the unfortunate Archduke of Austria, who was a good man, saw visions of Our Lady on the morning when he was murdered. I could even believe that the aged Emperor of Austria, on the morning he sent the ultimatum to Serbia, was specially favoured by a materialisation of his Guardian Angel, telling him not to be a fool. But I cannot with any ease believe that the Archduke put on his hat and began smoking a large cigar in the middle of Mass. And my faith fails me when I attempt to believe that the venerable Emperor attempted to stand on his head, in order to receive the American Ambassador. These incidents are not miracles; they are within the material order of nature; they disturb no chemical principle, save in so far as turning somersaults is bad for the aged; but they are things that do not happen. And in the same way I do not and cannot believe that the Emperor of Austria, however aged or ill-advised, could possibly have signed the ultimatum to Serbia, without knowing that it was at least twenty to one that it meant war with Russia. I do not believe that he or his counsellors, or any human beings, could in so violent a fashion have challenged the Slavs without knowing that they were challenging the Czar of all the Russias. I do not believe that they, or any human beings, would have challenged all the Russians without being absolutely certain that their action was backed up by their allies of all the Germanies. It was not a question of unfair terms of peace. What they forced upon the Serbs was war; with no thinkable alternative to war. To force such a war at all, upon the perilous peace of Europe, was for sane men to take the whole responsibility of the whole huge catastrophe that actually followed. But if they had not only taken the responsibility to God and their fellow-creatures of starting a European War, but also taken the responsibility to Austria of throwing her unsupported against Russia and all the Slavs, they would not have been even sane men, and hardly men at all. And, on the principle I have mentioned, I decline to believe that the two or three most manifestly rank and raving lunatics of the whole planet happened to have obtained the two or three chief political posts in Vienna, by mere coincidence and purely natural causes.

I happen therefore to believe what I said, and what for five or six years all my countrymen said; that the whole story makes no sense unless Prussia was really prompting the War. The idea of Austria prompting Prussia, or pushing Prussia into anything that Prussia did not want, seems to me starkly crazy and incredible to anybody who knows what the balance of

Europe has been ever since Sadowa and Sedan. For this reason I do not accept, at any rate in its fulness, what I may call the third or oriental theory of the War, I do not believe its ultimate origin was an antagonism to Slav Orthodoxy in Austria alone; because I do not believe that any such gigantic task would ever have been undertaken by Austria alone. And when we turn to the allies of Austria we turn again to the other explanations. We turn especially to the fourth explanation, which I have not yet given and which I shall now try to describe and defend.

This view was very little held, or at least very little emphasised in England. I do not remember any ordinary journalists except Mr. Belloc and my brother Cecil Chesterton and myself who insisted on it; though it was held by many learned men of a quieter sort, like Professor F. Y. Eccles, and could boast some inspiration in the past from so very human and virile a don as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. It was at least founded on the sort of view suggested by the latter in an admirable essay called " Antiquam Exquirite Matrem.” But it was suggested more than once abroad, and perhaps nowhere better suggested than in two chance French phrases that I will quote here. They sum up this theory of the war for those who understand it; but in the present atmosphere I fear it may be necessary to explain it further. The first word was spoken when a French diplomatist said in the first days of military contact, " In every civilised land there goes up the ancient cry, ‘ Down with the Barbarians! ' " And the other was spoken on the occasion of Italy’s entrance to the war, I believe by the President of the French Senate: “ As the old augurs watched the birds, we behold and hail, as an omen of victory, the flight of the Roman eagles.”

The theory was fundamentally this; that what was wrong was that Europe was standing on its head. That is, its head was underneath and its heels were on top. The heels were beautifully booted and spurred and went through admirable demonstrations of kicking or goose-stepping in the void; they were excellent things in their way, but they were not meant to be on top; they were not the sort of things to be trusted on top; and they were on top. Meanwhile the head of Europe, the natural spiritual and intellectual headship, was in the dust and even in the dirt; and continually being despised as dirty. That, we said, was a situation that was bound to produce some sort of revolt or reversal; and if people did not see it, it was because they had forgotten what that headship had always been, even to themselves as well as everybody else. There is only one word to express it. There is mixed up in all this a queer importation from America; imported, or exported, like a very undesirable alien. It is not a fair sample, of course. There is in the whole business of America a singular intellectual injustice; the republic that was made by recent and romantic pioneering has come to stand for standardisation; the nation whose instinct was all for individualism for the insolent impersonality of the Trusts. And the nation which emerged late in history out of a civil war fought by enthusiastic volunteers has come, by a stupid accident, to be popularly associated with that sort of morality that is too proud to fight, but not too proud to foreclose. So the rest of the modem world receives in a very curious fashion the very dregs of the democratic experiment; and remains ignorant of a dozen great American orators, in order to pick up and treasure some fragments of stale slang. And assuredly the very dregs of the dregs, which we have managed to lift or borrow from the very lowest level of American intelligence or unintelligence, is the now fairly common English fashion of using the word Dago.

The historical implications of this phrase are very amusing. The Dago, generally speaking, is a member of those darker races which have colonised South America and whose original breeding-ground is to be sought in the peninsulas of the Mediterranean. The chief characteristics of the Dago are knives, rags, romantic

T H JtC KJJSUKKfiCTiON O e HOME passions, reckless behaviour, garlic and guitars. With these things the beings in question create a perpetual disturbance quite out of proportion to their importance, or in other words to their wealth, and have been a terrible nuisance to the more solid communities who are acquainted with the Reign of Law. A considerable time ago, for instance, a gang of these desperadoes engaged in a desperate squabble with knives, after which one of them was left for dead and the rest were pursued by his friends with a typical vendetta. This sordid incident was exaggerated and made a subject for drama, or melodrama, until every child has been told that the name of the dead man was Julius Caesar, and that the man who stabbed him made some rhetorical claim to be his friend. Other incidents equally squalid and sensational have unfortunately flattered the Dago vanity; some Dago from one of the dirty little islands seems to have run away and become a soldier, like so many ne'er-do-wells, and caused considerable excitement all over Europe until his criminal career ended in his being captured and sent to jail in St. Helena. There is another sordid story, on which we need not dwell, about a runaway sailor who advertised himself in a very vainglorious fashion, and added insult to injury by actually discovering America. It is sometimes said unkindly that the discovery

TMJE RETURN OF THE ROMANS ought to have been hushed up. But it is only fair to say that it was another Dago who discovered Britain; and possibly that ought to have been hushed up too. It would certainly have been in better taste, if the Dagoes had hushed up all the tilings that they did in history; only if they had, there would not be very much history left. We need not linger on the unsavoury theme; but talking about rags, it is enough to add that there was once one Dago at least who actually professed that he preferred to be poor. He lived in Assisi and Bishop Barnes does not think that his way of going on would be at all proper in Birmingham.

In short, if it were really necessary to regard the legend of the dirty and dingy Dago as a specimen of the new culture of the new world, I fear that most people who know anything of human history will continue to get their notions from the old world. And having found the legend so very inadequate in the case of the Dagoes of South Europe, they will perhaps even venture to doubt its infallible truth about the Dagoes of South America. Anyhow, if all that is contemptible is a litter of little republics rocking with revolutions, they can extend that contempt to all Hellas in the age of Pericles and all Italy in the age of Dante.

In a word, it is all nonsense; inhuman unhistorical nonsense. For fully a thousand years.

indeed up to what is relatively only the last few years, all the nations of the North lived cheerfully by a culture that had come from the South; and that culture had come from, or at any rate through, the old international realm of Rome. It had nothing to do with political submission to Rome; it long survived religious separation from Rome. It was not something that men were ashamed of, like enslavement. It was something that men were proud of, like education. They were no more ashamed of it than Americans are ashamed of being white men from Europe, rather than black men from Africa or red men from America. They were no more insulted by it than a Christian is insulted by the existence of the Holy Land. It was something admitted and admired. Bayard was a Frenchman and Sir Philip Sidney was an Englishman and the Admirable Crichton was a Scotsman, and so on; and nobody doubted their loyalty to their own lands. But when these men were praised, the highest standard for praising them was to say they were as firm as Cato or as bold as Caesar or as virtuous as Trajan. There was no other kind of praise, such as was afterwards invented to fit the Nordic fad about our unmixed descent from Hengist and Horsa. Bayard fought with his face turned towards Rome and Lucretia; Sidney’s Arcadia was filled with the classic shepherds of Virgil. The

Admirable Crichton was admirable because the Latins admired him when he talked Latin in Bologna and the schools of Italy. Nobody can read three pages of real English literature without knowing this fact. Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek but plenty of Plutarch; and Hamlet, as well as Horatio, is really more the antique Roman than the Dane. But it is a complete mistake to suppose that this classical tradition was peculiar to classical scholars. It ran through the most popular and even the most vulgar things. Somebody wished to write a quite rowdy patriotic song, with the enlightening refrain of " Row-tow-tow-tow-tow,” and the excellent but limited object of glorifying the British Grenadiers. And the instinctive way for him to begin, the only way he can begin, if he is to make a complimentary comparison, is to start with the classics. He records the unimpeachable fact that some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules; but nobody of Hengist — still less of “ Hengst.” Somebody else wanted to throw off an equally casual and probably convivial English song about England's patron saint and his fight with the dragon. His St. George is quite confined to England, not without rather insular jokes against Ireland. He obviously killed the dragon not at Ludd but at Ludgate Hill. But when the poet wants to prove that the English champion was really recognised among champions, his natural way is to write like this:

Of the deeds done by old kings Is more than I can tell,

And chiefly of the Romans,

Who greatly did excel;

Hannibal and Scipio Had many a bloody fight,

And Orlando Furioso Was a very gallant knight.

Romulus and Remus

The town of Rome did build —

But St. George, it was St. George That made the dragon for to yield.

That is the tradition, the purely popular tradition, that runs through a thousand things in English life and letters; and I have only taken two or three random instances where I could take two or three hundred. All over England, the little children of the villages and the slums could be heard singing, as the refrain of the ritual of an ancient game, " For we are the Romans.”

That romance of Rome, as the international legend behind all the national legends, remained the chief reality of the world nearly down to our own time. As I say, it was a pride for Northerners as well as Southerners, for Protestants as well as Catholics; a truism for the French Revolution as much as for the Italian Renaissance. Then something began to happen, which has made all the mischief in modern Europe and ultimately made the Great War. As with most big and obvious things, it is hard to detect its dim beginning. Perhaps it began when the alliance failed against Frederick the Great. Perhaps it began when the alliance succeeded against Napoleon. The Industrial Revolution had a great deal to do with it; the expansion of a more Puritan England in America had perhaps as much; the commercial and colonial success of England had much, the temporary but rapid military success of Prussia had more. Anyhow, there entered the world a new notion, which may be called the notion of the New Nations. It was the idea that old centres like Rome were as dead as old cities like Nineveh, and that power was perpetually passing to other centres, always more novel and generally more northern. Like all false generalisations, it could always quote a plausible chain of coincidences. Power had passed from Egypt to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Spain, from Spain to France, from France to England, and now from England to Germany or America, according as the philosopher happened to be a Hun or a Yank. But the general notion was that the new power was to be found in the north, and especially in colder climates; though the time had not yet come for Spitzbergen to conquer the world or for the Eskimo to announce himself as the Superman.

The Nordic theory was supported by the Teutonic theory. Most of us were given a false moral ancestry like a forged birth-certificate; a document in Double Dutch which contradicted all our literature and living traditions. We were told that our culture came, not from the Cross which everybody could see, but from the Hammer of Thor which nobody had ever seen. We were told that England began her life with the Vikings, when it would be truer to say that she escaped with her life by killing the Vikings. All the natural flow of tradition from Rome to the rest of the world was blocked and hidden; and a counter-current set up suggesting that all generous impulses had flowed from the Nordic barbarians, like warm and genial currents flowing from the North Pole. This was the view of history taught exclusively in my youth to all the English, to nearly all the Americans and naturally to all the Germans and Scandinavians. But after the Prussian triumph over Paris, it overshadowed all Europe and imposed itself to some extent on the South; at least in a negative sense of inferiority or failure. In a word, something had broken or failed in the mind of the citizen of Europe; and what was gone was the respect for Rome. In the world of the imagination Rome was being treated, not only as a ruin but as a rubbish-heap; though a rubbish-heap poked and prodded and pottered over by aesthetes as well as vandals. The Mediterranean was no longer the Central Sea. It was a more or less ornamental pond in the back-garden that nobody need look at. The Latins were a sort of luxurious and yet impecunious remnant left over from a lazier age and incapable of effort or efficiency; capable only of gesticulating over organs and ice-cream carts. This was the universal tone implied by talk and teaching in the nineteenth century; I was brought up in the middle of it and I know. It was general, it was systematic, it was specially proud of being scientific. And every reflective man, every traditional man, every true European, every true Englishman who knew what the life had been in English letters and ideas, knew in his bones that it was all wrong.

It could not be true that our mother was so base a wanton; that what had borne us was so barren, that what had made us was so uncreative; that what had seemed most great to all our greatest countrymen could be of a sort to seem small to a few half-baked Junkers in Berlin. It was all wrong; the boots were on top of the brains; the boots were trampling out the brains; the barbarians were despising their teachers and, while they did, they could never be taught. It was this feeling of reaction against the nouveau riche of Europe, against the Prussian parvenu and all his like, when they looked down on the Latin culture, which was the deepest driving force of the Great War. It was this feeling, profound, instinctive, often unconscious, which filled those who insisted most strongly that the end was worth the heart-rending sacrifice by which the War was won. It was not merely British Imperialism, nor merely French nationalism, nor merely, if at all, Russian Pan-Slavism. It was something in every man who really felt like a citizen of civilisation, reminding him from what language the very word “ civic ” had come.

That is the fourth theory of the Great War; and few were they that found it. But about those four theories, I would ask the reader to remark a rather curious fact. On any of the first three theories, the War was a failure even where it was a success. It was a defeat for the conquerors. It was a loss to the winners. It was a thing not followed by any of the results that might rationally be expected to follow it. If it was all concerned with British commerce and prosperity, finding their rival in Germany, one would expect that British commerce would have grown more prosperous when British arms had grown more predominant. One would expect a boom in British trade following the

THE RETURN OF THE ROMANS 2ig slump of her rival. In fact, as we know too well, if poor old England went into the War for wealth, she got precious little out of it. In the same way, though in a less degree, we ca.n say that France got precious little out of it. It was more certain that Germany was weakened than that France was strengthened. We all know what Russia got out of it. She got defeat, collapse, anarchy and the anti-national experiment of the Communist Jews. So that in all these three cases, we have the extraordinary conception of a great power fighting somebody for something, winning, and not getting what it fought for. There is this to be said for the unpopular fourth explanation; that it is the only one of which the sequel makes any sense.

If it was Germany against Britain, Britain was almost as much weakened as Germany. If it was Prussia against France, France was almost as much foiled as Prussia. If it was Austria against Russia, Russia was as much ruined as Austria. But if it was something older and yet more central, lying to the south in the old centres of our civilisation, then the consequences are not quite so inconsequent. If it was, as we in our tiny group maintained, in the last resort simply Rome shaking off the barbarians — then nobody can say that Rome is ruined along with the barbarians; for Rome is in viable resurrection

That is the meaning of the cheerfulness of Italy, which is the great mystery of post-war Europe. Of all those who in that great trial emerged triumphant, the Italians alone had the air of triumphing. It was not merely Mussolini; it was not even merely Fascism; it existed before either had appeared. I myself was in Italy the year after the War, passing through like a tourist, but even a passing glance showed things seen in no other country of the Allies; for instance pencil scribbles on the walls, popular and even illiterate, but always to the same effect, " Italia vittoriosa ” — Italy the Victorious. They had suffered with the rest, as much from privation and more from anarchy. They were in a hopeless muddle, but they were in a hopeful mood. Though it is never possible to prove these impalpable things of psychology, 1 believe the explanation I have given is the right one. A certain sort of people felt that a certain load had been lifted off them. And the people were the people of the old civilisation, which for centuries had been mocked for its divisions and its decay; but of which the subconsciousness had never forgotten that it was once not only the master but the maker of the world. And the load was the load of the modem practical prestige of the North; the notion that Germany and the new countries were the only progressive and prosperous countries. Everybody thought the centre of the earth had shifted from Rome to Berlin; just as they once thought that it had shifted from Rome to Byzantium. But in both cases it was the Hew Capital that collapsed; and the world returned to Rome.

But, in the modern case, it was not only the fall of the New City but the fall of the New Theory. It was the check to the whole modem conception in the matter of new cities; the conception that progress is always progressing to new places and beginning afresh with new names. It was the notion that New York must be better than York, that New England must be better than England, that New Orleans must always have better prospects than Orleans; that Nova Scotia must always be in culture and philosophy a hundred years ahead of Scot-land of the Scots. It was the notion that civilisation is nomadic; or (as the progressive prefers to put it) on the march. The theory had turned men’s thoughts throughout the nineteenth century to new countries and colonies as the only possible starting-places for new movements. The theory is not true. The chief result of the Great War was to prove that it is not true. Like any other theory, it can show particular examples that are true. But it does not represent the present practical trend of the truth. What has really happened in the world since the War, if old progressives were not too blinded by old prejudice to see it, is the reawakening of old places and the return to old shrines. Warsaw is Warsaw once again; and Cracow is even older and therefore newer than Warsaw. Europe is full of early mediaeval things; the old kingdom of Bohemia; the old isolation of Hungary; the old empire of the Serbs. And if we look in the newspapers to see what is really happening, even the newspapers can hardly disguise from us that there is once more conflict in Jerusalem and once more order in Rome.

Only the aged have a future. A wind of death is coming in which only the very old will not die. These are unfashionable and unfamiliar sentiments, in a time when a superficial hustle and heartiness about new codes, new countries and new colonies fills up so much of the newspapers to the exclusion of the news. But they are so true, in the light of history, that the mere advocates of novelty have to take refuge in prophecy. They are certainly true of the history of Rome, whose profound roots have taken hold of the earth when so many newer and lighter seeds have been blown away. Everything was done to remove Rome from Rome. The Emperor was taken away; but the Pope remained. The Pope was taken away; but the Pope returned. The former movement could not make a new Rome at Byzantium. The latter could not make a new Rome at Avignon. The former had behind it the great civilisation of the Greeks; the latter had behind it the great civilisation of the French. The Greek Emperors thought they could move it easily to the East, as the French Kings that they could move it easily to the West. But the New Empire and the New Nations had the disadvantage of youth; which in these things is to die young. Rome is a rock not easily moved; and in the course of but a few centimes, as history goes, she had seen the French Monarchy go down before the Jacobins, as she had seen the Greek Empire go down before the Moslems.

Three times therefore, even in the period covered here, there had passed over Rome in ruin a miracle that woke the dead. Rome had become materially a rather deserted diocese; but deserted, disdained and dominated, the diocese rose up and made a new Empire. Rome was even more deserted in the Avignon epoch; but revived. Again, fallen to be mere local princes, the Pontiffs yet dug up a lost world, and ancient Roman statues could again be made in Rome. And now, before our very eyes something of the same almost spectral revivification has lifted and transformed the dust; and modern madness and treason and anarchy have brought forth, not ancient Roman statues, but ancient Romans.

I know that the phrase is violent, and I use it because the transition has been violent. I know all that there is to be said against such violence and such a transition, and I shall state plainly in another place where I think it has really done evil and violated things that it would be better to preserve. At the moment I am only, as a common witness out of a crowd, bearing testimony to a miracle. I have seen men climbing the steep stones of the Capitol carrying the eagles and the labelhm that were carried before Marius and Pompey, and it did not look like a fancy-dress ball. I have seen a forest of human hands lifted in a salute that is three thousand years older than all the military salutes of modern armies; and it seemed a natural gesture and not a masquerade. I have seen a great and glorious people, tom through ten centuries with too many splendid passions, suffering always from the division and distraction that comes from the very nobility of passions, now plainly possessed, solidly and visibly in the sunlight, by an ancient human passion forgotten for many centuries; the passion of order. It is not merely discipline, which is a thing taught and imposed; it is not the heavy regimentation which pedants in “ scientific ” states would impose on herds from which they stand apart; it is itself a popular appetite and a popular pleasure. It does not seem incongruous with the high republican memories of that steep road and that stony citadel; for the very faces of the crowd carrying the eagles or the fasces are not the shifty obliterated faces of a modern mob, but those faces of the old Roman busts which we have tried in vain to trace or remember when we saw them in beggars in Naples or waiters in Soho. So far as a man may give the sense of his experience in a single phrase; he has seen the return of the Romans.

Unconscious symbols are sometimes more solemn and imposing than conscious ones. I have heard it said that the Fascists themselves had originally a rude popular symbol of their own, which was only afterwards identified with the Fasces of their fathers. I know not if this is true in fact; but it is true enough in fancy, in the strange way in which we can trace something impersonal and yet individual in the large unconscious patterns made by the movements of such a people. There is a sense in which the historian is impressed rather by the slowness than the swiftness of Rome. And while the eagles remain as the obvious emblems of its swiftness, there has always been something very moving to my own imagination in that vast communal animal the Tortoise, that was

Pp made by the interlocking of the roof of Roman shields, logical as the radiating sections of a mathematical diagram, vast like the labyrinthine plan of a primeval city; and moving slowly into battle, but not turning back. We may call that other creature, if we will, the type of the Roman slowness. But it was the Tortoise that won the race.

These rough impressions, these popular afterthoughts, have often something in them truer than the more self-conscious heraldry. They are not always filled with the obvious swagger of lions and eagles. For that matter, it might be fairly said, in such a fancy, that the Roman battering-ram was only a sort of bellicose sheep. And I can well believe that even the terrible Fasces, whether in their old or new evolution, were something as homely and accidental as what they really look like; the bundle of a wood-cutter. This quality of something close to the common earth is in all Italian history; as Cincinnatus came from the plough and Mussolini from the village forge.

I was coming out of the church of the Ara Coeli, where I had been hearing Mass, when the vanguard of the advancing column came climbing up the rock, almost as if they were storming an alien citadel rather than reoccupying their own. Right up against the statue of the Stoic Emperor they bore the very emblems that he knew; so that if ever those blind eyes could see, they might have opened to see again the Lictors and the immemorial initials of the Senate and the People of Rome. As I was in the first shock of beholding so strange a resurrection, I heard the high, thin but refined voice of an American lady saying in my ear, “ Say (or words to that effect), is Mussolini here? ” If she had asked whether Marcus Aurelius or Mark Anthony was here, I should have felt it appropriate; for the moment I had forgotten Mussolini. It is something of an achievement to get oneself forgotten in that way.

I answered, rather abruptly but I trust politely, that I was told he had made a speech earlier, in the city, but had now left it; but I warned the young lady that I had no authority but rumour.

" Well/’ she said (and it were vain to deny, in spite of many disclaimers, that it sounded like “ Wal ” to me), “ if he’s here, I just want to see him; that’s all.”

And then, in that instant, I know not why, there suddenly blazed upon me the true meaning of that sort of American travel and curiosity. It is due to American truthfulness; or at least that truth which the Puritan conscience of New England still demands. I had always been puzzled about why all these good, healthy.

innocent Americans bother so much about European travel at all. They come a thousand miles to look at things which they do not pretend to like or understand; shrines and relics and religious pictures only enjoyed from one angle of artistic taste. I remember a worthy Rotarian, who would come across the vast ocean to see the dim and dreaming city of Bruges; and positively insisted on visiting the Chapel of the Sacred Blood. He had had some difficulty in finding it; but he was not to be deterred. I heard him shouting across the crowded market-place to another Rotarian, " Say, here, where’s this Blood they talk about? ”

Now you would think a man of that sort had no possible motive to visit the chapel at all. If he had said the chapel was a mouldering sink of superstition, I should respect him. But I never could make out why people should so ardently desire what they so honestly despise; or why they should commit idolatry without the excuse of faith. And somehow, the American lady’s words unexpectedly enlightened me. She was not thinking about Rome but about Boston or Byzantium, Pa. or wherever she lived. And her honourable New England conscience would not allow her to say that she had seen Mussolini, if she had not seen Mussolini. To have seen him as a mere dot in that huge crowd of heads would have been quite enough. She wanted to be able to say quite honestly to Sadie or Clytie when she got home, " I did see Mussolini."

It would have been quite useless if I had said to her: " What you see now is an astonishing historical resurrection. Those letters on that label on that spear are three thousand years old. The world no more expected to see them again than an ensign with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. That salute the men are making, as they pass the Unknown Warrior’s Grave, is something almost as remote as the stiff salutations in Assyrian sculptures. It may be all insolent and wicked, as God knows a great deal of that old world was insolent and wicked; but you have seen something in your travels, if you have seen such slaves and tyrants rise from the dead.”

It would be no good to tell Sadie that she had seen a ghost or a return of the past. But though I have all too little of the American virtues in this matter, the verbal exactitude or the intellectual courage of the interviewer, I will confess to so much of sympathy with the lady that I did not wish to leave Rome without having seen the mysterious and much disputed person to whom so much of this change is due.

I WENT into the black cavernous entry of one of those great castles or palaces, some of them very ancient, which are still used for many of the public offices, and showed a sentinel an order I had received from headquarters, granting me an interview, as was formally stated, with the Foreign Secretary; or in other words with the present head of the Italian State. I passed from official to official, a little more rapidly than is my experience in such attendances; and was eventually shown into a large room which seemed to me like a vast wilderness of tessellated pavement. The only other two things of which I was conscious was a picture of a Venetian sort on the wall, a portrait of some departed prince or ruler I imagine, and a small table at the other end of the perspective from which an alert, square-shouldered man in black got up very rapidly and walked equally rapidly right across the room, till we met not far from the door. He shook hands and asked me in French if I minded talking in that language. I said I did it badly but would do my best. Then we sat down by the little table and had a conversation which remains in my mind as a sort of puzzle; for, to tell the truth, I do not quite know what happened or whether I was talking at random, or prompted by my companion, or, in short, how the conversation came to be what it was.

I am sorry to say that I have nothing to report about the great Fascist's views on Fascism. I have formed some opinions on it, as will be seen elsewhere, but they were mostly collected elsewhere; I formed certain impressions of him, but they were not necessarily connected with his office. Benito Mussolini has a face of the type to be found here and there in Italy; it is nicknamed Napoleonic, but the term, though partly true, rather misses the point. Its peculiarity is that, in spite of bulging brows and a prominent chin, there is everywhere else an effect of the face being concave; a hollow look in eyes and cheeks between the heavy brow and the heavy jaw. It might be called the reverse or mould of the comic face caricaturists give to noodles, with large prominent noses and retreating brows and chins. As a face, it fits very well into that mask of bronze which is so much paraded by friends and enemies and called Mussolini. The mask of bronze stands for something, like a crest; but I rather fancy it is part of the fighting-armour, like a vizor. Anyhow, there is very little of that in the man’s personal demeanour in private. There is a great deal more fun in him than masks of bronze are supposed to indulge in; he laughs readily and he is not an Italian for nothing. He has the vivacity of gesture; and one or two movements that may on public occasions have a touch of the theatrical, such as the weird power that some actors possess, of making his eyes suddenly shift and shine. It may be natural enough, but I should not complain if it was in a sense oratorical. I know that a dictator must be a demagogue for a time; just as a demagogue must be a dictator for a time. I know that militant and democratic Latins cannot be led by the merely familiar and good-natured smile of the old squire or the constitutional monarch. It was for none of these reasons that the conversation was curious and, had I been merely poking for political secrets, disappointing. The legend of the mask of bronze has left many people with the impression that Mussolini has no topic except Mussolini. The best comment upon this is to record that the very first thing he did was to dump me down in a chair and ask me about the Disestablishment of the Church of England.

In short, to put it in one way, I did not interview him because he interviewed me. He put a rapid succession of questions covering a wide field, but mostly concerned with my country and not his. Doubtless had Ibeen a truly valuable and trustworthy journalist, of the sort that rises by merit in his profession and attracts the approval of the Wise and Good, otherwise the big newspaper-owners, I should have been " quickest on the draw ” and got my questions in first; and not been hindered (as I so often am) by a musty Victorian tradition of manners, leading me to allow my host a say in the trend of conversation. In two or three snappy seconds I should have been saying, “ And to what do you attribute your success, Signor Mussolini? " and all those recognised openings, such as, " And what, Signor, was the proudest moment of your life? " And I might have gone down that smooth and slimy path to God knows what lengths, until I was asking, for the benefit of millions of readers, “ Do you attribute your genius to your mother? " or, " Have you had throughout a continuous sense of the presence of God? " It is possible that he made me talk as an astute diversion to avoid these questions; anyhow, they were avoided, first because I should in any case have avoided them myself, but also because he instantly started to ask me questions; questions on all sorts of things I should hardly have thought he had ever heard of; such as the debate on the Revised Prayer-Book. Something I said about Imperialism and Internationalism seemed to arrest his attention sharply and lie said, " Ah, that is very interesting. Do you think it possible to give a different turn to the development of England? ” I told him, in increasingly halting French, that I knew it was difficult, or perhaps nearly impossible; but I did desire England to be more self-supporting and less dependent on the ends of the earth, for I thought such dependence had become very perilous. Before I knew where I was, I found myself talking at large about my own fad of Distributism; and now, between my embarrassment and my excitement, my French went all to pieces. God alone knows in what language the last part of the conversation found expression on my side; or to what wild barbaric tongue, older than Babel, its gasps and nasal noises might be supposed to belong. Thinking it not improbable that Signor Mussolini might think I was mad, I rose as if to bow myself out. He rose also and said, with what was probably irony but was none the less most polished courtesy, " Well, I will go and reflect on what you have told me.” This quality, I may remark, belongs to all Italians; to men of much humbler station than Mussolini, though he also is a man of the people. Wilkie Collins said somewhere that the mark of a gentleman was ” unsought self-possession,” and Italians are a nation of gentlemen. A common plasterer or painter or something fell off a ladder, so to speak, into our bedroom in the most embarrassing manner; but he was not at all embarrassed. He apologised exactly as an English duke would have done. And certainly there is the very extreme of this unsought self-possession in the blacksmith's son who now bears in Italy, in its old and real sense, the name of the Duke.

As we parted, I said, " Vous me pardonnez, Excellence, que je parle frangais si mal ”; at which he laughed again and said, “ Ah, vous parlez frangais comme je parle anglais.”

And I went away, as I have already hinted, ruminating on something like a riddle. I hated the idea of having talked too much, instead of listening to a more interesting person; but I could not quite get it out of my mind that the interesting person had possibly intended that I should talk a great deal about my politics, rather than he talk about his. In any case, I apologise to everybody, and not least to Signor Mussolini; for this was a very irregular business and no example of an interview for The Young Journalist’s Guide. But of one thing I am certain; that if the Dictator has used violence, it is not because he cannot use wit; and if he has narrowed his appeal to his own nation, it is not because he lacks an intelligent interest in the philosophy of the world.

I KNOW it will be the general impression about this book that I cannot talk about anything without talking about everything. It is a risk that I must accept, because it is a method that I defend. If I am asked to say seriously and honestly what I think of a thing, such as the Vatican State or the Fascist Government, I must think about them and not merely stare at them. And there is no thinking of such things except in relation to the world in or against which they stand. A universal situation is the cause of Vaticanism or Fascism; and a local cause is certain to be false. In the first chapter, I found I could not explain certain statues to anybody, even myself, without insisting that they would not be there at all but for certain remote religious dogmas and distinctions. In this chapter, I realise that the first fact about Fascists is that there would be no Fascists, but for a vast and, as I think, ruinous landscape of the whole of Europe. The Roman statue stands up white against the dusty gold of the Greek Empire or the dark forest of barbarism; the Fascist stands black against all the faded party colours, all the rags and ribbons of a long political riot or carnival. I cannot say what I really think of these things, without such digressions; and I do not propose to say anything else.

W HEN I went to Italy I had one dark suspicion in my mind, which prejudiced me against Mussolini and his government. It was not the statement that he was reactionary or militaristic, for I knew that such terms may mean anything and generally mean nothing. It was not the fact that journalism is not free in Italy; for, being a journalist myself, I am of course aware that it is not free in England. Naturally it was not, in my case, the fact that Mussolini has declined to act in the accepted and normal capacity of a Free Thinker; which is persecuting all those who choose to think that Catholicism is true. With much or most of all this or what it symbolised I roughly agreed; but there was something about which I profoundly doubted if I did not disagree. There was one little dark cloud on the horizon; one black speck of scepticism on the mind; which made me think that the whole business might have a meaning exactly opposite to everything that I meant.

This bit of bad news I had heard was that English travellers were now made much more comfortable. It was an indirect suggestion; I have forgotten how and where the horrid whisper first reached my ears; but it seemed as if some of my own country folk of the comfortable classes, travelling in the new Italy, had found that things went more smoothly for them. They were less bothered by thieves, which looked rather bad in itself; they were less troubled by beggars, which looked even worse. Thieves are theoretically things to be discouraged; though several saints, from St. Edward the Confessor to St. Francis of Assisi, were blamed for encouraging them. But beggars are manifestly sent by heaven to make the comfortable classes more uncomfortable; and I must say that the beggars of Italy threw themselves into their task with an enthusiasm and success which may well have seemed somewhat excessive. Perhaps even comfortable people ought not to be made quite so uncomfortable as all that. And I can readily believe that some reform and modification may have been advisable and generally advantageous. But it is a bad thing in itself when foreigners begin to have it all their own way in any country; especially in a country of such great and generous traditions, and such Christian and kindly popular customs as Italy. It means that some popular patchwork, of little sacrifices and charities suitable to the people, is being torn across to suit some stupid external force that has money or push behind it. If ever I hear, in the course of the next ten years, that Americans are really happy in England, I shall know that the happiness of the English has departed.

I was rather reassured, however, on hearing that there were not so very many English people in Rome; and I was almost completely reassured when I found them, and heard them talking about the Fascist Government. I will say a word later, in a more serious sense, on how far I think that Government really has reacted towards regimentation too much; and whether a slightly larger infusion of beggars and thieves would not be a gracious indication of the growth of Christian fellowship. For the moment, it is only just to the present Italian Government to testify that it is by no means so much admired by foreign visitors as is supposed; and as I, in my first faint sickening dread, had fancied or feared. The English actually on the spot have many complaints to make of Mussolini; but it is not unfair to say that the most solid complaint is that he taxes them very heavily for living in his country. Everyone would like to agree with his own countrymen in a foreign land; but I confess I do not quite see why Englishmen should have an indestructible natural right to live cheaply in Italy, if it is to the disadvantage of the Italians. Anyhow, it is sufficient to restore my confidence in Mussolini as a man who is acting, according to his lights, for the advantage of the Italians. The fear I had felt that the old popular life of the South might have been nearly flattened out, to make a smooth highway for globe-trotters, has largely left me. I still think that Mussolini makes the old lighthearted Italian rather too responsible. But even that is better than being a common Member of Parliament; who perpetually says he is responsible, and never responds.

Or

B EFORE attempting, even in the vaguest way, a description of Fascism which may be mistaken for a defence of Fascism, I think it well to state that I doubt whether in the actual original Italian conflict I should have been for the Fascists, The party I should naturally have chosen is that called the Popular Party, which was specially the party of the Catholic Democrats. I have heard criticisms of it from reasonable critics; and I am exceedingly proud of the fact that the Catholic Democrats are chiefly criticised for having been too democratic. I remember especially the views of an Italian friend of mine, who is a moderate and critical supporter of Fascism, and who certainly would not dislike the Popular Party merely for being popular; or for sympathising with the populace. He used a strong expression that the Popular Party was merely Bolshevism dressed in white instead of red; that is, Communism masquerading as Catholicism. It may be very perverse of me; but I heard this also with a deep feeling of pride; of pride in the party that I never had the chance to belong to. If the charge was false, it was only another of the endless contradictory charges with which Catholics are pelted whatever they may do; called slaves if they are loyal to a king, or rioters if they are compassionate to a multitude. If the charge was true, it was at least enough to refute and flatten out a good many other charges. When next we hear the Roman Catholic religion called the opium of the people, or charged with keeping the poorer classes in subjection by the hypnotism of superstition, we shall not forget that in the terrible hour of trial and division priests were blamed for going only too far in their denunciation of capitalism; and were blamable, if they were blamable, for yielding only too much to their indignation at the oppression of the poor. If this was indeed the excess by which the Popular Party failed, it was assuredly a most glorious and Christian failure; the sort of Christian failure which can generally in the long run be counted as a Christian triumph. For the time, it has failed; and many not without sympathy with it seem resigned, on arguable grounds, to its failure. But let it always be remembered that it was not put down by ecclesiastical authority, as so many would eagerly anticipate; it was put down by secular, scientific, highly modern and rational authority; not by the Church but specially and specifically by the

State. The party led by a priest was too revolutionary lor the party led by a Syndicalist. And in truth it does seem, lor good or evil, to have been pretty revolutionary; and there wei’e some things done in the course of strikes and agrarian actions which might surprise even my Mend Conrad Noel, waving the Red Flag clown at Thaxted. To this I will only add one hint, which I would not unduly emphasise, for I leel towards the memory ol the Popular Party nothing but respect and regret. But my own private belief is that the real reason of its failure, in competing with Fascism which had many of the same ideals of social justice, was that it became suspect in the matter ol the peril of patriotism. In one sense what is Catholic must be international; but it is never quite normal if it is not also national. When people try to thrust mere internationalism down the throat of Catholic nations there is always a violent national reaction; so there was when English Socialists tried to do it during the Dublin Strike, so there will always be when cosmopolitan diplomacy tries to disarm the eternal vigilance of Poland. For Catholics know in their bones that men are citizens of a city, and not merely of a cosmos; and that the hearth is sacred as well as the altar. Anyhow, that is the only doubt I should myself have had about the original Catholic Popular Party; I should have had many more doubts about the Fascists; and I have a good many doubts still.

I am only concerned with Fascism here to the extent of suggesting that it is a revival, just as it is certainly a revolution. But I did not see the revolution; and in the nature of things I saw the merest segment of its result. I know too little about the facts to bear witness to them. I know too much about the modern newspapers to accept them as complete witnesses. It seems fairly certain that the revolution, like most revolutions, was stained by many infamous crimes and indefensible acts of violence; though they were not all on one side. But as I have passed much of my life in trying to persuade my fellow-countrymen that their fortunate immunity from the revolutions of the Continent is rather an accident for which to be thankful than a virtue of which to boast, I am bound to say the same of the Fascist Revolution as I have always said of the French Revolution or the Irish Revolution. I can hardly in honesty play the Pharisee over Mussolini when I refused to do it over Michael Collins; and it is just as easy, and in one sense quite as just, to call Michael Collins a murderer as to call Mussolini a murderer. The fact is that they both did a number of things that nobody would think of defending except on the ultimate theory of national self-defence; that is, the theory that society was in dissolution and the fatherland at the point of death. That the readers of the Morning Post would denounce the Fenians and excuse the Fascists, while the readers of the Daily News would denounce the Fascists and excuse the Fenians, does not concern me. But since I have so often protested against this English self-righteousness about foreign violence, since I have so often suggested that Danton was not a gory baboon because he made the Terror or used the guillotine, that Irish rebels were not dirty assassins because they conducted a guerilla war, in the only way in which it can be conducted, against a much more powerful army — I do not propose to treat the Fascists as fiends, merely because their rebellion was as nasty as rebellions always are.

All that concerns my argument is that there certainly is a New Italy as there certainly is a New Ireland. I do not approve of all the things that were done for the resurrection of Ireland; and I think it exceedingly improbable that I should approve of all the things that were done for the resurrection of Italy. But I have no personal information about the details of those things; the development of my own thesis did not bring me in contact with them; and as I cannot give a personal verdict of my own, I will not repeat all the partisan verdicts of other people. And though I have never thought it patriotic to encourage my country in tyranny and stupidity, I should be a very poor Englishman if I forgave the men who ambushed and shot any number of loyal and innocent English soldiers, and then reserved all my vindictiveness for the slayers in a foreign fight, which I could not fully follow at the time or fully study on the spot. The point here, as I say, is that certain people saved Italy from something; or sincerely believed that they were saving her from something. What that something was brings us to the only question relevant here. And it is very relevant; for it is something from which England has not yet been saved.

In short, I resent British superiority to foreign fury; because it always assumes that the British have gained placidly all that the foreigners would gain furiously. In truth, it is not that English conditions are not so infuriating, but only that English people are not so infuriated. There is a great deal of good in their attitude; but there is good also in the other. And nobody can begin to understand Fascism who does not know that it was not so much a revolt against the Communism prevailing in Russia as against the Constitutionalism prevailing in England.

I T was even worse than that. The first fact in favour of Fascism is one far more unfamiliar to its admirers than its opponents. In England at least, they are so ignorant of it that they do not even know they have not got it. They are so impotent even to imagine it, they could never even discover that it does not exist. Even to give it an intelligent name would probably only make it more unintelligible. If I were to say that the countrymen of Machiavelli had rediscovered The Prince, there would only be an impression that they or I were up to some trick or other. If I were to call it The King, I should be supposed to refer to the King of Italy, with the proper respect with which we refer to the King of England. But that would be about as true as translating II Duce as The Duke. If I were to call it by the alternative name of The Republic, many would retain the strange idea that it is something to be got by removing the King. If I were to remind them that the word Republic was almost the same as the word Empire, and was used to the last as the true title for Empire, by the people who invented both words (and both things) I should be pushed gently but firmly to the door; and possibly quite right too.

I will therefore abandon the attempt to talk in terms of reason, or the history of political thought, and say that there has come back in Italy a thing sometimes known in the ancient world, but very nearly unknown in the whole of the modern world. This thing is a Government, which is not merely a Governing Class. Above all, it is not merely an employing class. It is a third thing, distinct from employers and employed, and corresponding to what was once called The Prince or the Republic. The Prince might be and often was a tyrant. The Republic might be and often was a tyranny. But it was not necessarily the same as the tyranny of the richest class in that state; it could on occasions tyrannise over that tyranny. There were states more on the modern model, where merchant princes ruled, not so much because they were princes as because they were merchants. Venice is the obvious example; but all the more obvious an example for being a rather isolated example. There were places where the merely wealthy not only ruled the state, but were the state. But as a general rule, before the age of modern finance and industry, the Prince or ruler was strong enough to be independent of the rich as well as the poor; and often made himself quite unpleasant to both of them. The King was not the nobles; he was not merely one of the nobles; he often cut off their heads, or (what concerns the sociologist more) cut off their entails. It has passed into a proverb that one of the royal and romantic villains of history, like King John or Ivan the Terrible, would treat great lords or abbots as traitors, merely for being richer than he was. It is agreed that it was a very wicked King who thus ruined the rich. It would be a very good King who would do it now.

Now the main fact of modern times, as everyone knows, is that there has been a widespread quarrel between rich and poor; or (in the language of those rugged men of the people who like the longest words they can find in a dictionary) between capitalists and proletarians. Now in most modern nations, especially those noted as very modern nations, there are only these two contending things; there is no third thing that can attack them both. There is a thing called a Government, of course, but it is simply the capitalists or the servants of the capitalists. It is sometimes moderate and humane; because capitalists are sometimes moderate and humane. It is in various mild degrees sympathetic with Labour; because some employers are in various degrees sympathetic with Labour. Capital may be more or less considerate when it controls Labour; but there is nothing that can control Capital. In a big modern state like America, for instance, it is ultimately Big Business that controls the American government; because Big Business is bigger even than America. It is needless to add that it is much bigger than England. The notion that when some well-meaning noodle of a nobleman, or some respectable hack of a lawyer, presides over a Capital v. Labour committee he is equidistant from the two points of the two parties, is a fancy that will amuse anyone acquainted with practical politics. He may, and generally does, do his best; he may want to meet the workers half way; but so may any one of the employers. But the workman who simply sees, and says, that another man with a black coat has been added to his black-coated adversaries, is talking the only common sense of the case. There have been occasions when independent gentlemen have really tried to differ from the employers. In those cases they have always failed to stop the employers. Modern government is capitalist government; not as a term of abuse, but as a fact of science. As it is expressed in the beautiful diction of the golden West, what the Big Man says goes. But it does not go in Italy.

I do not mean that Italian government is my ideal of justice, or that it does not ever support the employers, or that it might not support them where I should oppose them. I mean that it may support them, but it can oppose them. The ordinary modern government cannot. The ordinary regular respectable representative government, by Wall Street via Washington, cannot. The ordinary British government, by the Party Fund via the Parliamentary group, cannot. The new Italian government can; and it has again and again adopted a policy quite unparalleled in the whole political world of to-day; which is worthy of a sharp and close attention which it has hardly received. It is not Socialism; it is not Distributism; but it is distinguished and divided in a most startling manner from anything to which we are accustomed as Capitalism. It is in fact simply Command; the national law overriding the industrial law. Perhaps there is no shorter way of putting it for English readers than to take an English example. How would the Fascist method, for instance, have applied to the last great Coal Lock-Out (mysteriously described as a Coal Strike) which led to the interlude called the General Strike?

It will be the more amusing, because anybody who remembers that business will remember that the Conservative Party rang with appeals for British Fascists — for very British Fascists. The dear old ladies, who search the Mormng Post for the secret of the Bolshevism of their cooks and housemaids, were sure that Mussolini was the man to sustain them in that unequal encounter. The jolly old soldiers, whose conversation gives colour and warmth to the meetings of the Putney Primrose League, were quite sure that these Fascist fellows were the sort of fellows to deal with the striker fellows, who were neither more nor less than Bolshevist fellows. All those aunts of the human race, whom it has heartlessly left stranded at Bath or Brighton, prayed aloud that heaven would send us, in the dreadful hour of the Coal Strike, a real resolute Dictator like this man Mussolini. And indeed, I was tempted to join in their prayer. For all those worthy Tories who wanted a Dictator like Mussolini would have jumped out of their skins if they had got one. Nobody would have been more astounded by what Mussolini had to say. For, by every analogy from his own theory and practice, what he would very probably have said in the British Coal Crisis is this.

" You, Coal-Owners, will continue to pay the Coal-Miners the full wage which they demand; and if you do not, I will take it from you. If you say your business will be ruined, you must take the risk; and leave it to us and the future. If it is really ruined, in the sense of your being liable to appear in rags begging in front of the

254 ttte RESURRECTION OF ROME churches, wc will do something for you out of Government funds. We will help you to do justice. We will bribe you to do justice. But we will not suffer you to do injustice. We will not suffer you to oppress the hireling in his wages; we will not suffer you to discharge the hireling without his wages, and add to the chaos of unemployment. We will not dispossess you as the employer; but you must go on employing. We will not argue about the abstract rights of your being the paymaster; but you must go on paying; and paying properly. See to it, therefore, that every man- jack among the Miners receives the full payment which you say you cannot pay, when he turns up at the pay-desk on Saturday; and if you do not do it, Corfio di Baccho, you will get what is coming to you.”

That is what Mussolini would probably have said to our Conservatives and Coal-Owners. That is the economic expedient of Fascism. The policy is not especially my policy; the philosophy is not perhaps my philosophy. It is open also to a number of quite arguable objections. It may be said that the method is not in the narrow sense economic; that it is a policy of desperate patching up, like Inflation or the Dole, and so many desperate remedies in our declining and perhaps dying industrial world. It may be said, what is but another aspect of the same thing, that it is not certain how long such a method could possibly go on; though a more prosperous Italy, attained thus in the meantime, might yet meet the question. It has the disadvantage, from my personal point of view, of accepting a little too automatically the assumption of the modern relations of employer and employed. It may be an interference with liberty; it is certainly an interference with property. It may be a makeshift materialistic coup d’dtat blind to the best ideals in individualism. But it is not being bossed by the big employers; and every British government has been.

That is the first note of Fascism 1; and I do not recognise the wood-notes of the Primrose League or the pastoral pipe of Mr. Baldwin. It was because Mr. Baldwin would not talk thus firmly to employers that there is now a Labour majority in Parliament. It is because Mussolini does talk thus firmly to employers, whatever his errors in other ways, that there is no Labour opposition to him worth talking about in the new Fascist State. I shall have plenty to say in a moment about what is really worth talking about, in the way of opposition and criticism in the Fascist State. There are some ways in which I think it has gone wrong; but I am not just now even trying to show where it has gone

1 1 do not know, of course, what Mussolini thought of that particular cuso, or what he might do in identical cases, X merely point out that what is peculiar to Fascism is bullying or bribing employers to employ. Wo need no Fascism to teach us to uneraploy. We nf-liievc that with thp moot constitution 0! won nnd calm.

right. I am trying to show where it has gone; and along what rather new and unique path it has travelled. And the first fact to note about it is this despotic independence of the ordinary capitalist regime; which is well illustrated by its ordering businesses to pay big wages or punishing business men if they discharge work-men unjustly. For the moment I do not even argue that it is a good thing; I argue that it is a third thing; acting independently of Trade Magnates and Trade Unions and capable of giving orders to both. And I say of this what I said at the beginning; that it is, for good or evil, the return and re-establishment of government; of government as a separate thing distinct from the differences and interests of the governed. I can easily imagine objections to it, I could listen with patience to many current arguments against it. But I cannot listen with patience to the current arguments for it. I cannot tolerate the tosh of weak snobs and vulgar reactionaries who wail aloud for a Strong Government and never fancy for a moment that they might themselves feel its strength. I have no respect for the feverish and feminine aristocrats who are always asking for a Master, and then imagine that he would be their servant. People of that sort have never even imagined the meaning of the word Government; since they cannot picture themselves as governed but only as governing. And there is no sharper way of bringing the point home to them than by the test of the great dispute of the Miners, about which their newspapers talked such nonsense four years ago. For there is a simple answer to their cry of what Mussolini would have done in the Coal Crisis. There never would have been any Coal Crisis. The Coal- Owners would have been forbidden to make one.

I have always called myself a Liberal, though I preferred to call myself a Radical, because it is not so respectable. I would willingly call myself a Republican anywhere except in America; where that is disgustingly respectable too. But by the word Republican I should mean something that has really very little to do with the presence or absence of a modern constitutional monarch. It means what St. Thomas Aquinas meant when he said that there was needed to make a city a mob of free men; that a commonwealth consists of citizens equal in their civic rights as symbols of their human dignity. This civic ideal is not in all cases inconsistent with monarchy, but it is, in my opinion, inconsistent with aristocracy. The mob which is one thing may have a monarch who is one man; he is not only the expression of its unity but even of its equality. But it is, I think, a totally different ideal that there should be two sorts of citizens; as for instance.

free men and slaves. And when I called myself a Liberal or Radical in English politics, I meant that I was opposed to the spirit of oligarchy in that society; to the big estates which prevented the existence of small proprietors; to the big employers who subordinated the interests of the employed; to the one large shop-keeper who swallowed many small.shop-keepers, and so on. Whether many other Liberals, or any other Liberals, ever meant this by Liberalism I will not claim to say; in later days I have had my melancholy doubts. But I do say that such a war of democracy against oligarchy means something; or would mean something, if anybody would wage it. Only when we pass from the theory of Liberty to the facts of Liberalism, we find ourselves facing certain facts; and these are exactly the facts which the Liberals will not face.

The Republican movement, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and continuing in the Radicals and Liberals of the nineteenth, was struck down by a deadly disease; and would not even consult a doctor. That is what is chiefly the matter with modern Representative Government; that it will not admit that there is anything the matter. It persistently refused the offers of comparatively sympathetic French Nationalists and Bonapartists, Irish Sinn Feiners and English Independents of various lands, to take it away to a hospital; until the Italian Fascists, in a fury, locked it up in a lunatic asylum. The biggest and most outstanding events in European history are never recorded in newspapers, and hardly perhaps, in official reports; and there is very little record in the Parliamentary debates of the great historical incident of the Decay of Parliament. But it has happened, exactly as the Great War or the French Revolution has happened; the only question that remains is whether by tracing the causes of the malady we may form some notion of the cure.

The Republican ideal fell, like most things, by suicide; by cutting its own throat or contradicting itself. But it did, in a rather special and startling degree, contradict itself. This is especially true in one matter which immensely concerns the Fascist reaction; and it can be put in two sentences. At the start The Republic simply meant The Public Thing. At the finish, The Republic simply meant The Secret Society. It had become by far the least public of all possible forms of government. It had become a system in which membership of the public body, that could be criticised, was far less important than membership of a private body, entirely protected from criticism; sometimes by a denial of its existence, always by a denial of its object. It is quite a mistake to suppose that this reversal of the Republican idea was a mere matter of words and forms. The first

Republicans were perfectly sincere in wishing their rule to be as public as possible. The best men of the French Revolution really were men of the Forum and the market-place; men living as far as possible under the open sky; men like statues standing almost permanently in the street. An American like Jefferson seemed really to wish to live not only in a White House, but in a glass house; that he might receive the supreme presidential privilege of being pelted with stones. Doubtless this can-dour became a cant, like all good things; and it is now rather the fashion to make fun of it. But in this matter I am Jeffersonian; and prefer the old America to the new. I have much more respect for the old Publicity, which meant that we should know all the worst that could be known about the rich and the rulers, as compared with the new Publicity, which means that we are only to know all the best that the rich choose to say about themselves.

Anyhow, that was the Paradise of Publicity, as conceived by the first Republican idealists. And with the entrance of the Secret Society, which was the entrance of the Serpent, came the Fall. I know that some maintain, in the Manichean manner, that the Serpent had created the world, including the garden; or, in other words, that the Secret Society created all the democratic ideals from the first, T believe this to be nonsense, because it takes no note of the natural appeal of those ideals. I have always sympathised with those democratic visions; and I never belonged to any secret society. But, however it may be in the squabble about dates and details, the broad truth is that thousands of people thought they were establishing a broad and open brotherhood of all men; but with remarkable rapidity the power passed to small and secret brotherhoods of conspirators. The part played by the Freemasons in the politics of every European country was a thing perfectly well known to every man in practical politics anywhere; but it was never discussed in Parliament; certainly it was never discussed by Parliamentarians as a danger to Parliamentarism. We need not discuss here all the various kinds of nonsense, on both sides, on the subject of the Freemasons. They were not Masons; they were certainly not Free; in their most important fields of action, they were not even free to say that they were bound.

But there was another element in the old Republican ideal, thus so swiftly and strangely ruined. This was the fact that it did originally denounce Luxury as the great enemy of Liberty. It will provoke a roar of amusement, and amazement, among modern Parliamentarians, to inform them that there was quite a clear ideal of Poverty among the first and best Jacobins,

26a THE RESURRECTION OF ROME as sincere in its way as that among the first Franciscans. The accepted proof of a politician’s soundness was that he should be honourably poor; there was something in it of what we call the Simple Life and they called Republican Simplicity. Few realise that the name of Napoleon grew glorious, not only through his glory in the matter of victory, but because he had a good name in the matter of living simply and paying his way. I need not attempt to measure the huge and ghastly reversal of all that in modem politics; in which so many Liberals have been so very liberal to themselves. Luxury has become almost another name for politics; there is no world where it is so insolently assumed that money must fly on the most flying pleasures. As the poet wrote:

The evil power which buttressed privilege

And went with women and champagne and bridge

Broke — and Democracy resumed her reign

Which went with bridge and women and champagne.

I am not Puritanical about these things; and I do not mind the pothouse politician nor grudge him his pot of beer. But I do remark that professional politics has got itself mixed up with a plutocratic orgy at the very opposite extreme from its original ideals. That excessive exorbitant ever-encroaching Luxury is the cause of three-quarters of the corruption that has rotted out the vitals of Parliamentary government. And when next we hear poor old Robespierre, or some rather priggish Republican, jeered at as a sentimental bore for saying that the Republic is founded on Virtue, and that it cannot endure without the simple and laborious worth of the Virtuous Man — let us look a little at the sequel and salute him; and admit that he was not so far wrong.

Now without pretending that Mussolini is an ideal Republican, without denying the sense in which I say he is a real Reactionary, I do think it rather interesting to note that he has reacted violently against those two modern Republican vices, in the name of the two ancient Republican virtues. He has reverted to the original ideal that public life should be public; and emphasised it in the most dramatic manner by stamping oh the Secret Societies as on a tangle of vipers. And he is quite as serious, I might say quite as solemn, as Robespierre himself, on the subject of the civic necessity of Virtue. That is to say, for those who do not know Latin or understand the Latin use of words, he feels the same sense that social life depends on that sort of stoical and virile morality which some call merely negative morality. Many a modem young man on the make would probably laugh at him, but Jefferson would have understood him perfectly.

Therefore it seems to me something more than a coincidence that the great Fascist has actually-rescued the two lost and neglected ideals of the ancient friends of freedom. Liberals of the nineteenth century tradition need not necessarily agree with him; I shall be quite contented if they are ashamed of themselves. I am quite ready to join them, since I also have been one of them. We ought never to have allowed irresponsible organisations, with secret signs and pledges, to undermine the pure publicity of the Republic. We ought never to have allowed irresponsible hoards and hauls and mushroom fortunes, with all their trail of vulgarity and vice, to be mixed up with those whom we chose as champions of democracy. Republicans should never tolerate a Secret Society. Republicans should never tolerate a Secret Fund. Radicals should never have tolerated such a tangle as that of luxury, laxity and secrecy; and they have themselves to thank if somebody has suddenly turned round and refused to tolerate them.

It is chiefly, however, the hypocrisy about Secret Societies that has ruined the Liberal cause throughout Europe. They are now, in some right or wrong fashion, being rooted out by Fascism. They ought to have been rooted out by Liberalism. They ought a thousand times to have been rooted out by Republicanism.

They are, in every term of their very nature, a denial of the Republic. It is this secrecy, and the secrecy about the secrecy, the silence about the silence, that has, if not justified, at least produced, the rough and ready violence of the reaction. An armed minority attacking a mob of other minorities is not fairly playing the game of democracy. Granted; but a secret oath sworn against the public vote, and a private combination to betray all public combinations, is also not playing the game of democracy. It is not altogether surprising if, after about eighty years of that incessant betrayal, people have grown tired of the game. People have grown tired of it even in England; where they never played that particular game even hard enough to grow very tired. Hence, for instance, Freemasonry has in England a very harmless tone; for where men do not take any politics seriously, they naturally do not take even secret politics seriously. But they have only to cross to Ireland to find all the Lodges are Orange Lodges and as Anti-Catholic as the Grand Orient. But what would most Englishmen feel about the mere facts of foreign politics; if they were ever allowed to hear of them? To mention only one fact; suppose it were discovered that the Rationalist Press Association could prevent any young English officer from getting his company or his regiment, in the due course of promotion, if it could be shown that he went to morning service at his parish church at eleven o’clock. Suppose there was no promotion whatever for anybody except agnostic captains or atheist colonels; and documents existed in the War Office with black marks against any soldier who went to any service. That would be an exact description of the official document about the French Army found under the Freemason Government. If that is Democracy, I am amused. If that is Liberty, I am still more entertained. If that is Liberalism, to which I supposed myself to belong, I am considerably concerned.

I conclude therefore, upon this point, that it is not so much that Fascism offers no points upon which it should be attacked, as that Liberalism has unfortunately lost the right to attack it. But it is not so much that Liberalism might under better conditions have really attacked Fascism. It is that Liberalism under any conditions ought to have attacked corruption and conspiracy and above all plutocracy; and, for all practical purposes, it never did. If the original Republican and civic ideal had been true to itself, there would never have been any need for a Fascist reaction against it; or the setting up of Dictatorship as an alternative to Democracy. I, for one, should have infinitely preferred that the purgation of our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by Radicals and Republicans. It was they who did not prefer it.

The soul does not die by sin but by impenitence. Human institutions also, which are all made in the image of the human soul, perish not because they have sinned but because they have not repented. It is an old story in the case of the old tyrannies; as when men said that the Bourbons had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The same process by which the ideals of the French Revolution overwhelmed the French Monarchy has in turn overwhelmed the ideals of the French Revolution. But it was not because the politicians were unpardonable; but because they would not even ask for permission, let alone for pardon. It was not because they were always as black as they were painted; but because they were never as white as they were whitewashed; and they were always whitewashed. What is the matter with Parliamentarism is that it says there is nothing the matter with Parliamentarism. That is the attitude which in every case of every institution has always produced some sort of riot; and in Italy of the twentieth century the rioters have become the rulers.

If, when all is said, I regret that Mussolini is a Reactionary, a thousand people will agree with me; and I shall entirely disagree with them. What they mean by a Reactionary is either something that Mussolini most certainly is not; or else something that I most heartily applaud him for being. For the first, those who imagine he is what we call a Tory have the total reverse of the truth; especially when they themselves are Tories. Mussolini is not half so much of a Tory as I am; he is not half so much of a Reactionary as I might wish him to be. He seems to me to believe rather too much in new things and new methods, in science, machinery and modern experiment. On the other hand, in the sense in which he is, not indeed a Tory but subconsciously a traditionalist, I think he is a thousand times right. If it is reactionary to believe that human dignity is better than a sort of humanitarian impudence, that citizens who will not defend the city are not worthy to govern it, that women should be respected like mothers and not merely let loose to climb everywhere like monkeys, that piety and the honour due to the dead should be, as it was for the Pagans, a permanent religion for the living — if that is being a Reactionary, I am a Reactionary and I am very glad that he is a Reactionary. But, all the same, I am not glad that he is a Reactionary; and I think that being so much of a Reactionary is his one great mistake.

It all comes from the unfortunate habit of using words in their right sense. When I say reaction, I do not mean romance or tradition or loyalty or love of order, or any of these things even in their excess. I do not mean superstition, or oppression, or tyranny, or slavery, or any of these things even in their milder forms. When I say reaction I mean reaction; the mere fact of reacting against something, or permitting that something to make us do something against it. It is said that in physics action and reaction are equal and opposite. It is a very good reason for keeping physics out of morals and metaphysics. The whole object of a wise man is not to react exactly as his opponents act; not to go so far in the one direction as the other man has gone in the other. He may, perhaps, after due reflection, go even farther; but he will not go exactly as far; nor will he go because the other has gone. He will not have his own movement made by another. If he does, though he ascend into heaven, it is only on one end of a seesaw; though he be swung like a club, he is only swinging like a pendulum.

A Reactionary is one in whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. He is one in whom even boredom boils and ferments at last by its own stagnation; and he acts not only with impatience but with the accumulated power of patience. He often acts very rightly; but it is his temptation to think that anything that was conventionally right is necessarily wrong. He deals too much in associations and too little in distinctions. He secs too much in social symbols; like the nineteenth century rebels who wore trousers because old-fashioned people wore knee-breeches; and then wore knee-breeches because old-fashioned people wore trousers. He tends too much to class all the features of an epoch together, and to date them rather than define them. And even when he is right, there is always a danger that what was really good in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new one. I think it really true that Mussolini is reacting too much against the Liberalism of the nineteenth century. I do not refer especially to the violent language which the Duce, like every dictator, sometimes uses in a militant speech to a mob. That is a part of something that the Northern temperament will perhaps never understand; the familiarity with fierce and even coarse expressions in the direct appeal of a true dictator to a true crowd. When Mussolini said, or is reported as having said, " X will set my foot upon the rotten limbs of the Goddess of Liberty,” he was talking like Danton who said of the royal execution, *' France flings among the kings of Europe the head of a king.” There are many refined persons in the North to whom that way of talking has never seemed to be quite nice. We are not democratic enough to have a dictator. But there is, apart from the diction, the materials of a distinction. What was wrong with the eighteenth century was not that a Monarchy was functioning, but rather that it was not functioning. What was wrong with the nineteenth century was not that Liberty was pampered or exaggerated, but that Liberty was pursued without being found. What was wrong was not Liberty, or even Liberalism; it was Liberals who were not even true to Liberalism, let alone Liberty. If the limbs of Liberty are rotting in the modem world, it is rather from lack of exercise than from having been worked to death. But I quite admit that as a catchword, or what these modem people call an Ideal, it had been horribly worked to death; and the Italian orator was really expressing a very sensible contempt for a catchword. But I think he is rather too prone to confound the vice with the virtue to which its hypocrisy does homage. Because a mean little minority, mostly members of a morbid secret society, manages to parade at many modern elections as The Majority, he is rather prone to deny any real rights to the real majority. But that is not to be superior to the professional liars of the political group, but rather to accept them at their own valuation. It is almost to be defeated; for it is to be deceived. Ours has not been an age of popular self-government; but of very unpopular secret government. It will be time enough to react against popular government when it has begun to act. We may begin to cry out for a Reactionary to make the world unsafe for democracy, when there has really begun to be any democracy in the world. Meanwhile I think it is an error to mix the ideal with the imitation and corruption; or to try to trample on an invisible goddess because a handful of dirty little politicians have lied when they called themselves Liberals. And it is perhaps especially an error for a man merely to repudiate the ideal of popular rule, when he has gone a great deal nearer than most modem rulers to making his rule popular.

That is what I mean by using the word Reaction or regretting that the Fascist leader is too Reactionary. That he is not Reactionary in the snobbish sense of the current economic war, I have already shown. He is still a Syndicalist; and any number of our friends and neighbours would call him a Socialist. For though the word Socialist may be made to mean many things, its meaning among its most ordinary critics is simply that of a man who is ready to interfere in any way with those who have a lot of money. In that sense Mussolini would appear as dangerous as Trotsky to many in England who worship the one and execrate the other. Nor, as I have said, is he what some call Reactionary about the machinery of modem life; but rather breathlessly progressive. But if I may thus dare to use the word reaction as if it meant what it says, I think there is a case for saying that this revolution is too much of a reaction. I mean it in the psychological sense of a recoil; that he does sometimes recoil so much from anarchy as to talk only of authority; that he does recoil from mere pacifism as to seem to endorse mere militarism; that he does recoil so much from the babel of tongues talking different heresies and contrary forms of nonsense, as to make his own moral thesis a little too much on one note. But this rigid insistence on the recoil is connected with another fact that must be understood.

I am not merely suggesting that the Black-shirt is not so black as he is painted. I am suggesting the more subtle truth that he paints himself more black than he is. It is a part of this reaction of disgust and disdain that it does sometimes disdain to appear even as popular as it may really be. A Parliamentary politician, whose name will bring a burst of jeers in any club or pub in all England, will talk as if he were followed night and day by the loving prayers and wafted kisses of the whole population. A Fascist leader, whose portrait is in every cottage, will sometimes talk as if he stood alone and at bay, with his back to the wall, facing the whole

Sp mob of Italy. It is, if you will, a case of variety in vanity; but on the whole I prefer the latter, possibly because I have seen so much of the former. The point may be put in many ways. We may say that the successful demagogue must denounce demagogy. We may say that the tyrant must despise popularity in order to be popular. The real question is that of the effect on freedom. Now we all agree about freedom. We all agree that we must not take liberty, except from people who take liberties. Unfortunately, it is those systems, which boast of not taking liberty, that do take liberties.

When a gentleman informs you that he is going to trample on Liberty with his boots, you might naturally expect that there would be unlimited trampling in practice, for it to be so frankly avowed even in principle. But, putting aside for the moment the matter of political journalism (to which I shall return later) I am by no means sure that the poor old goddess of Liberty has been trampled only here. She has been trampled a good deal, poor lady, all over the modern world. But in an ordinary everyday sense, she is a good deal more trampled in London than she is in Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen is not conscious of that network of nonsensical regulations and restrictions, about drinking and eating and buying and selling, which have become a common byword in our own comic papers. Some of the statements made about the Fascist regimentation in the foreign Press I can tell, by experience, to be exaggerations. I was told in England that everybodyin Italy was forced to walk in a certain way along the streets, turning to the left like an army on parade, and that people were perpetually arrested for the least deflection from the line. This is the wildest sort of overstatement. There are only three streets in Rome where it is necessary to walk on one side when going in one direction, and on the other for the other direction; and anybody who looks at the streets will agree that there is a good deal to be said for the general convenience of the arrangement. But an ordinary man stepping out of an ordinary house or hotel walks about exactly as he would anywhere else. This is a small matter; only it is in fact much smaller than the foreign critics suppose. To take a larger matter; Prohibition would seem insane slavery in Rome. But it is time we passed to larger matters still.

Mussolini does openly what enlightened, liberal, and democratic governments do secretly. This is not the same as saying that Mussolini necessarily does right. Far from it; quite otherwise; heaven forbid. What enlightened, liberal and democratic governments do is generally wrong. What Mussolini does is, in my opinion, sometimes wrong, and I think there is more in the theory of the liberal democracies than could be inferred from his action — or theirs. But the point to grasp is that he does and defends what they do and do not defend. They conceal; they effect the same thing, because they think it convenient; but they do not defend it, because they think it indefensible. He is acting with his own principles of Fascism; they are acting against their principles of Freedom.

It will be the simplest test to take the two chief facts which the enemies of Fascism allege and which the friends of Fascism do not deny; but indeed rather proudly proclaim. Now whether or no these two limitations ought to exist in Italy, there is not the shadow of a doubt that they do also exist in England. The first is the fact that the Press is more or less varied in the subjects it discusses; but it is not free to say what it likes. And the second is that the voters at a political election have a limited choice, but not an unlimited choice. In a slowly and subtly modified aristocratic state like England these objects are attained by various ingenious methods of which I may say a word in a moment; in the democratic atmosphere of the Latins they have to be attained by very plain proclamation and direct action. But whatever action, or even accident, may have achieved the result, in both countries it is achieved. The British newspapers do in fact belong to two or three men, who have only to agree to suppress something and it is suppressed. The British elector does in fact have to choose between two or three candidates, each provided by a recognised Party Caucus and each supported by an unrecognised Party Fund. If anybody fancies that in modern England anybody can in fact start a really independent daily paper or stand as a really independent candidate, with the least chance of doing anything, let him try.

There do exist in fact in modem commercial states certain customs and practices which prevent, and are meant to prevent, free and frank criticism of those in power. One of the most powerful, for instance, is the interpretation of the libel law; which has this enormously practical custom added to it; that the wealthier the man or firm supposed to be slandered, the heavier are the damages imposed. This means, quite simply, in practice, that any poor man will certainly be ruined if he thus collides with any rich man. There are still perhaps honest Britons who will say that justice would always be done in British courts. I have no doubt that many Fascists would say the same of Fascist courts. But as it is quite certain that Bolshevists would say the same of Bolshevist courts, as also Spanish Inquisitors of the Spanish

Inquisition, the test is somewhat uncertain as a guide to truth. And as I personally prefer to live in a world of reality, it is enough for me that I have never known one single case of any misconduct being brought home to a really powerful plutocrat in a court, though it were a fact that would be perfectly familiar and universally admitted in a club. It occasionally happens that adventurers already on the rocks, and known to have practically lost their money, do also legally lose their status or freedom; like Hatry or Hooley or Bottomley. But solid Capitalists, such as control the State, are not in fact convicted or punished in the courts of the State. In the United States they cannot even be punished for murder, except by terminable imprisonment often followed by tolerated escape.

Let us frankly admit, therefore, that there is a terrible contrast between the tyranny which Fascists exhibit and the liberty which we are supposed to exhibit. But, as a fact, the best that can be said for our tyranny is that it is not so much exhibited.

I do not say that the Fascist has found the solution to the problem of modem liberty; but I do say that the modern Liberal has not even found the problem. Yet at present it is a very practical problem, and not one for wicked foreigners only. We all agree, as a platitude at the base of politics, that if there were no law or government at all, the brutal would trample on the weak and the result be not even an equal anarchy but an unequal oppression. What we do not see is that the same is now in fact true of the intellectual world, especially under our economic conditions. Merely to allow anybody to say anything does not in fact mean that everybody says everything. It does not mean, as the silly old Tories were terrified to think it would mean, that a mob can roar with a million voices. It means that a man who can buy a megaphone can drown everybody else’s voice. Merely to allow anybody to print anything does not mean that we shall all get our exquisite poems, our important private memoirs, or our grossly neglected pamphlets or programmes printed. It only means that any man with money can instantly cover all the hoardings with his own posters, and leave not even a comer for our posters. Merely to say that everybody can start a newspaper means in practice that nobody can start a newspaper; except the two or three people who can afford to start something which for some time will not even pay. What we used to call equality of opportunity really means unfair grabbing of opportunities; and grabbing by greedy people from honest people and rich people from poor. Everybody began by seeing this in the matter of material anarchy or government by a free fight. They soon saw that, before long, a free fight is not even free. Within onr own time they saw that it applied also to a ruthless economic struggle or competition; the sort of free fight that was described as free trade. Nobody nowadays, however little he may like the extreme called Socialism, supposes that such a free fight is really a fair fight. But we have not yet realised, what the Fascist in some rude fashion has realised, that the same is to some extent true of truth and error in their fight in the market-place; subject to the lords of the mart. But it is even more so when we throw into the scale, as we do in England, the capricious and plutocratic prosecutions for libel.

The whole case against modem Parliaments is the case about Corruption. There may be all sorts of different shades of opinion on that charge; but that is the charge. Some may be so happily at home in the modern world as to think that Corruption does not matter. Some may he so fantastically remote from the modern world as even to think that Corruption does not exist. But the charge now openly made against Parliamentarism everywhere is that it does exist. Now it is staringly self-evident, on the face of it, that nobody can debate that particular political problem at all, if he is restrained from making moral charges against public men, as if they were wanton little private slanders against private men. To say we are free to discuss politics, but must not accuse politicians of corruption, is exactly like saying that we are free to discuss Fascism, but must not accuse Fascists of tyranny. That is to say, we must not accuse them of what they are accused of. We must not accuse them of the only thing which the world in general really thinks they stand accused. The Fascists do say this and avow it and act consistently upon it; but I am not necessarily here agreeing with them, or commending anything in them except their candour. But when once we have realised what the whole modem movement in the matter of Parliaments is, the proposal that we should politely talk " politics ” and leave out “ personalities " is simply ludicrous nonsense on the face of it. It is quite simply refusing to discuss the modem problem of Parliamentarism at all. We can no doubt rave in leading articles about the inconsistency or illogicality or incompetence of politicians; but politicians are not now being criticised for inconsistency or illogicality or incompetence. They are being criticised for money-grubbing; they are being criticised for it everywhere in private life; if they cannot be criticised for it in public life, every intelligent critic is muzzled, exactly as if he were muzzled by Mussolini.

It is the same, of course, with the selection of candidates for Parliament; and especially of members of Parliament. The Fascists limit the choice and say so; we limit the choice and do not say so. We limit the choice by certain elaborate and carefully constructed methods of electioneering, which are practised with professional skill and success, like the method for neutralising the negro vote in the Southern States of America. The most obvious method is making elections enormously expensive, allowing, encouraging, or even insisting on expenditure on a complicated conventional etiquette of cars, canvassing, literature and the rest; so that the ordinary citizen could not conceivably compete with his ordinary resources. This at one blow limits all candidatures to capitalists of great substance, or to those to whom such capitalists wish to pay money through the instrument of Party Funds and subscriptions. Any such poor candidate, therefore, passes through a secret test exactly like the test of the Fascists; except that it is a great deal more secret. The people who can pass this test, of general approval by the plutocracy that rules our politics, are not all people exactly alike; they are not automatic machines; they are not in all matters slaves. Nor are the people who can agree to give, a general support to the Fascist regime. But in both cases the powers have a power of selection;

and especially a power of suppression. The notion that the ordinary English voter lets his eye roll freely over all the crowds of his fellow citizens in the street, and then thinks he would like to vote for a nice looking navvy or a dear old pedlar, and does so, is far more of a wild fairy-tale than it would be to call the regime of Fascism a regime of unrestricted freedom. The average voter sees two men in collars, distinguished only by rosettes of different colours, two men he never saw before and never bothers about again; selected by somebody else for some reason unknown and often unmentionable; and between these, like a poor enslaved Italian, he makes his free and fearless choice.

I am well aware that two black shirts do not make a white. But I assure the reader that I am not, in this case, in the least trying to prove that black is white. I wish there were in the world a real white flag of freedom, that I could follow, independently of the red flag of Communist or the black flag of Fascist regimentation. By every instinct of my being, by every tradition of my blood, I should prefer English liberty to Latin discipline. But there is the Latin discipline; and where is the English liberty? Not, I deeply regret to explain, anywhere in England. It is not a simple matter, in that connection, of the Italian wearing a black shirt and the Englishman a white shirt.

If the Englishman wears anything, it must be a white sheet. It must be a garment of penance and lamentation, in honour of the great and glorious liberty — that he has lost. For he has lost it more completely than these men who actually boast of throwing it away. The general atmosphere of our Parliamentary politics is thick with proposals, such as Prohibition for instance, which the fiercest Fascist in all Italy would regard as absolutely demented interferences with private liberty and private life. If Mussolini were to propose Prohibition for Italy, everybody would think that he was quite literally a lunatic; they would realise it with tragic regret, as one would realise the physical madness of Swift or Maupassant or any other great man. Yet that is the sort of notion that comes quite naturally to the sort of country that is called a democracy, and is always in fact a plutocracy. I am not discussing such Pharisaical persecutions here; but I do draw the line somewhere, for the honour of the English sense of humour. I will not listen to people who are first pharisaic about English drink and then pharisaic about Italian discipline. I will not hold up my hands in pious horror at the bullying ways of foreigners and then go back and bully my own poorer fellow-countrymen much more.

In a word; it is idle in our modem circumstances to murmur that Fascist Italy is not free to say this word or that, as if others were in the habit of handling all words freely and putting all truths into words. Fascist Italy is founded on having gained the new and dreadful freedom to say one word; the one word that all the world had been forbidden to say. It claims, for good or evil, not to mention this or that, but to shout and cry aloud something that has been sealed up and silenced; the secret of our whole political system. That word was sealed up; and that word is loosened; and the men who heard it loud as a thunderclap are not for the moment thinking about liberty in lesser things. That word is Treason; which is the final and filthy flower of Corruption; the fact that men in high places, trusted with great popular responsibilities, could betray. They could, and they did, sell the just demands and defence of their own people to foreigners and invaders, covering it with a cosmopolitan cant, and acting under a cosmopolitan compulsion. That is what we are forbidden to say, in the countries of the capitalist newspapers; and that is what the Italians have gained the right to say under Mussolini's censorship of the Press. It is so vitally distinct from anything else that anybody else was allowed to say, that it may be a little time before they even want to say other things. When they do, I think it highly probable that a somewhat freer system will be advisable and will probably be established. The question is one of proportion and not perfection; and I am not in any sense offering this patriotic captaincy, born in the hour of peril, as a perfect thing. No; I should not specially describe modern Italians as men who are free. But I should describe them as men who are freed; freed from the special servitude and silence of our time; and above all, the servitude and silence which England still endures.

There is a logical case against Fascism; though it is seldom stated logically. Least of all, of course, is it stated logically in England. Considering how little the Anti-Fascists understand the Anti-Fascist case, it is hardly surprising if they do not understand the Fascist case. The intellectual criticism of Fascism is really this; that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite. It is valuable to know that something in our nature does cry out for order, especially after a real experience of disorder. But when we come to decide the nature of the order, there is, in fact, something disorderly about the way of deciding it. When I try to put the case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the ultimates of the philosophy. A very acute Italian friend of mine said that he was on the whole in favour of Fascism, but that he did not believe the current story that the country had been in danger of Communism. " Italians would never be Bolshevists,” he said, " for Bolshevism you must have a general idea; and people here have only practical ideas.” Perhaps in that very comparison there looked forth again for an instant the old antithesis of the Greek and the Roman; as when the Greek iconoclast looked at the Roman image-maker. I think it is possible that Fascism is too practical; possibly too practical to last. Anyhow, it is curious that when I cast about for a clear definition of the theory, I recall first the words, not of a Fascist but a French Royalist. M. Charles Maurras, a profound and subtle writer, wrote on the first Fascist outbreak something like tins, describing democracy in general. " The mass of mankind is null or toneless {atone) but the vigorous, intelligent and public-spirited part of any particular people is not null or toneless.” This is the idea implied in many remarks of Mussolini about the mistake of ruling by the Majority; and the superiority of an intense and intelligent minority. Anyone can see the practical sense of this; a.s a matter of practical politics; or rather of the present impractical politics. Every sane man knows the contemporary case against the Majority merely in the sense of the Machine; the mere mechanical register of electioneering. But there is an answer to it; and I do not think that Mussolini, or even Maurras, have considered it enough.

The answer is this; that after all there is only one majority; and there are a great many minorities. And, by a curious coincidence, they are all intelligent, vigorous and virtuous minorities; they say so themselves. What is the exact nature of the authority which selects one sect of authoritarians? The Majority may be a clumsy and corruptible test; but it is a test. The Majority test is like the Monarchy test; it may produce poor specimens, but it does not produce doubt or disorder about those produced. If the Czar’s son is the Czar, there is always an unquestioned Czar; and if the man with most votes is the President, there is always an unquestioned President. But things may be a little more alarming if one vigorous minority meets another vigorous minority, and they set out to prove which is the more vigorous. If you say that somewhere or other in the state there is a spirited section, which has got to show its spirit, it will probably do it by conflict that is very spirited indeed. But setting seven sects to fight for authority will end in the very anarchy which you call on authority to end. This moral fact is only for a time masked by the material fact that one section is sufficiently strong and popular to silence the rest. In this sense Fascism may silence rebels in practice, but it invites rebels in principle. It invites any minority to claim the same superiority to Fascism which Fascism claimed to Communism. The common complaint against the Blackshirts is that they exercise too much authority; the real complaint against them is that they have too little. The Anti-Fascist argument is a Fascist argument. To believe in majorities as such is at least to let the majority rule; to believe in minorities as such is to call on all the minorities to rebel. That this is the last thing which the present " practical ” Italians propose does not alter the ultimate difficulty of the doctrine underlying the law. I am far from being merely opposed to Fascism; but we must realise the perfectly reasonable sense in which it may be said that the two really fixed and orderly constitutions are the old legitimist hereditary kingship and Majority Rule. Merely counting heads may be, and generally is, a silly business. But if we substitute valuing heads for counting heads, it is rather likely to end in cracking heads. The representatives of both vigorous and virtuous minorities will value each other’s heads by butting each other like rams.

Thus Fascism is really forced by its own logic, or illogicality (as we happen to think it), up against the primary problem of a fixed moral philosophy. It is not enough to be a minority.

2g0 THE RESURRECTION OF ROME when the Flat-Earthers and the Holy Rollers are a minority. There must be some test of truth, that can distinguish the sane from the mad minority. There must be an accepted ethical scheme; as there really was in the minds of the wisest men who founded the democratic experiment in the eighteenth century. Jefferson did not say that anything a majority did was right; he said that any violation of certain God-given human rights was wrong. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that we have now to deal with minorities and not majorities, it becomes even more essential that a minority should be tested by a morality. I do not altogether accept the Fascist view in these things; hut the point is that the Fascist cannot really accept his own view, with any satisfaction to his own intelligence, until he has settled this question of jDermanent values. In short. Fascism has brought order into the State; but this will not be lasting, unless it has brought back order into the Mind.

I will not ask here, or perhaps answer adequately anywhere, the next great question of where this fruit of the true knowledge grows wild; or on the shores of what ocean, as the French writer said, the gods have rolled the stone that covers the truth of things. I can do no more than hint, in any work of this kind, how a free man is to find that staff?>nd standard of justice that will support him against the spiritual pride of minorities as well as the automatic tyranny of majorities; that pearl of great price, the truth that is intrinsically true. I can only point out here that the logic of this revolution and reaction does bring it face to face at last with the need for some such reality; for an authority that is more than an anarchy that can manage to rule. As to where that strange growth is to be gathered, I can only answer that for me the crossing of the Tiber was like the crossing of the Styx; and that I sought it in a strange land.