But, curiously enough, it was under Giolitti that things suddenly
changed in aspect, that against the Giolittian State a new State
arose. Our soldiers, our genuine soldiers, men who had willed our war
and fought it in full consciousness of what they were doing, had the
good fortune to find as their leaders a man who could express in words
things that were in all their hearts and who could make those words
audible above the tumult.

Mussolini had left Italian socialism in 1915 in order to be a more
faithful interpreter of "the Italian People" (the name he chose for
his new paper). He was one of those who saw the necessity of our war,
one of those mainly responsible for our entering the war. Already as a
socialist he had fought Freemasonry; and, drawing his inspiration from
Sorel's syndicalism, he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of
Reformist Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution and
violence. Then, later, on leaving the party and in defending the cause
of intervention, he had come to oppose the illusory fancies of
proletarian internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible
integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of the national
organism, affirming therefore the sanctity of country for the working
classes as for other classes. Mussolini was a Mazzinian of that
pure-blooded breed which Mazzini seemed somehow always to find in the
province of Romagna. First by instinct, later by reflection, Mussolini
had come to despise the futility of the socialists who kept preaching
a revolution which they had neither the power nor the will to bring to
pass even under the most favorable circumstances. More keenly than
anyone else he had come to feel the necessity of a State which would
be a State, of a law which would be respected as law, of an authority
capable of exacting obedience but at the same time able to give
indisputable evidence of its worthiness so to act. It seemed