Giolitti had been superceded, at least so far as militant politics
were concerned. Between Giolitti's Italy and the new Italy there
flowed, as an imaginative orator once said in the Chamber, "a torrent
of blood" that would prevent any return to the past. The century-old
crisis had been solved. The war at last had begun to bear fruit for
Italy.


VI

Now to understand the distinctive essence of Fascism, nothing is more
instructive than a comparison of it with the point of view of Mazzini
to which I have so often referred.

Mazzini did have a political conception, but his politic was a sort of
integral politic, which cannot be so sharply distinguished from
morals, religion, and ideas of life as a whole, as to be considered
apart from these other fundamental interests of the human spirit. If
one tries to separate what is purely political from his religious
beliefs, his ethical consciousness and his metaphysical concepts, it
becomes impossible to understand the vast influence which his credo
and his propaganda exerted. Unless we assume the unity of the whole
man, we arrive not at the clarification but at the destruction of
those ideas of his which proved so powerful.

In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the
comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the "totalitarian" scope of its
doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization
and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and
feeling of the nation.