Repentance. We do not deceive ourselves by thinking that we shall succeed in sinking completely the now wrecked ship of Bolshevism. But I already note signs of repentance. I think that some day the working classes, tired of letting themselves be duped, will turn to us, recognising that we have never flattered them, but have always told them the brutal truth, working really in their interests. If, to-day, Italy has not fallen into the Hungarian abyss, it is due to us, because we have saved them by active interposition and by our life.
We have then one clear duty, which is to understand the social phenomenon which is developing before our eyes, and to fight the deceivers of the people and maintain a sure and immovable faith in the future of the nation.
Towards Equilibrium. There has been a period of lassitude on the morrow of all great historical crises. But afterwards, little by little, the tired muscles recover. All that which before was neglected and despised becomes once more honoured and admired. To-day nobody wants to talk of war, and it is natural. But when a certain period of time has elapsed, things will change, and a large part of the Italian people will recognise the moral and material value of victory, they will honour those who fought and will rebel against those Governments which do not guarantee the future of the nation. All the people will honour the great “arditi.” It was the “arditi” who went to the trenches singing, and if we returned from the Piave and the Isonzo, if we still hold Fiume, and are still in Dalmatia, it is due to them.
Three martyrs, among the thousands who were consecrated to the war, clearly defined what were to be the destinies of the nation. Battisti tells us that the boundary of Italy should be at the Brenner; Sauro that the Adriatic must be an Italian sea and commercially Italo-Slav; while Rismondo tells us that Dalmatia is Italian. Very well! Let us swear upon the standard which bears the sign of death, of that death which gives life, and the life which does not fear death, to keep faith to the sacrifice of these martyrs! (Loud applause.)
FASCISMO’S INTERESTS FOR THE WORKING CLASSES
Speech delivered at Prato della Marfisia in Ferrara, 4th April 1921.
The manifestations of enthusiasm culminating in the meeting at the Prato della Marfisia solemnly confirmed the triumphant development of Fascismo at Ferrara, the red province par excellence. On that occasion some fifty thousand contadini, who had come on foot from the remotest centres of the vast province, spent the day acclaiming the “leader of the black shirts” and the new faith in Italy. A noteworthy feature was that many red flags belonging to the disbanded and defeated Socialist leagues were deposited before Mussolini and thereupon trampled underfoot by the crowd.
People of Ferrara! and I say people intentionally, because that which I see before me now is a marvellous gathering of the people, in both the Roman and Italian sense of the word. I see among you children who are upon the threshold of life, and not long ago I shook hands with an old Garibaldian, a survivor of that heroic Italy which was born at Nola in 1821, when two cavalry officers hoisted the flag of liberty against the Bourbons, and which triumphed at Vittorio Veneto with the great and magnificent victory of the Italian people. I see also among you factory hands and their brothers of the fields.
We, Fascisti, have a great love for the working classes. But our love, in as far as it is pure, is seriously disinterested and intransigent. Our love does not consist in burning incense and creating new idols and new kings, but in telling upon every occasion and in every place the plain truth, and the more this truth is unpalatable the greater the need to speak it out.
We, Fascisti, hitherto slandered and maligned, wished to continue the war in order to obtain freedom of movement in Italy, and although not giving way to a sense of weak demagogism, we are the first to recognise that the rights of the labouring classes are sacred, and even more so the rights of those who work the soil. And here I can give hearty praise to the Fascisti of Ferrara, who have undertaken with facts, and not with the useless words of the politicians, that agrarian revolution which must gradually give the peasants the possession of the soil. I strongly encourage the Fascisti of Ferrara to go on as they have begun, and to become the vanguard of the Fascista agrarian movement in all Italy.