soul.


13. Discipline and Authority.

Fascism, in short, is not only a lawgiver and the founder of
institutions, but an educator and a promoter of the spiritual life. It
aims to rebuild not the forms of human life, but its content, the man,
the character, the faith. And for this end it exacts discipline and an
authority which descend into and dominates the interior of the spirit
without opposition. Its emblem, therefore, is the lictorian _fasces_,
symbol of unity, of force and of justice.


POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DOCTRINE

1. Origins of the Doctrine.

When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan,
through the columns of the _Popolo d'Italia,_ of those who had
supported and endured the war and who had followed me since the
constitution of the _fasci_ or Revolutionary Action in January 1915,
there was no specific doctrinal plan in my mind. I had the experience
of one only doctrine--that of Socialism from 1903-04 to the winter of
1914 about a decade--but I made it first in the ranks and later as a
leader and it was never an experience in theory. My doctrine, even
during that period, was a doctrine of action. A universally accepted
doctrine of Socialism had not existed since 1915 when the revisionist
movement started in Germany, under the leadership of Bernstein.
Against this, in the swing of tendencies, a left revolutionary