I must then conclude that a strong policy has yielded really tangible results. Every day the country feels intensely the identification of Fascism with the vital strength of the nation. Nobody suffers ostracism in Italy; everybody is allowed to live under the definite régime of law. Many elements of the old popular subversives understand now to what extent a well regulated life is a benefit, not only for one class, but for every class of the Italian people. Few are those who are still confined, and few are those who intend to disobey. As Minister of the Interior, I distributed a circular on January 6th, 1927, to the Prefects, in which I pointed out what their duty in regard to the population must be.
A new sense of justice, of serious purpose, of harmony and concord guides now the destinies of all the peoples and classes of Italy. There are neither vexations nor violence, but there is exaltation of what is good and exaltation of the virtue of heroism. In every class, among all citizens, nothing is done against the state, nothing is done outside the state.
Many have finally opened their eyes to this serene and severe truth; the Italians feel themselves of one fraternity in a great work of justice. The sense of duty, the necessity of action, the manner of civil life mark now an intense reawakening. The old parties are forever dead. In Fascism politics is fused into a living moral reality; it is a faith. It is one of those spiritual forces which renovates the history of great and enduring peoples.
CHAPTER XI
NEW PATHS
WHEN one watches the building of new structures, when hammers and concrete mixers flash and turn, the occasion is not one for asking the superintendent his opinion about the plays of Bernard Shaw or for expecting the architect to babble discursively on the subject of his preferences between the mountains and the seashore as summer playgrounds.
It is absurd to suppose that I and my life can be separated from that which I have been doing and am doing. The creation of the Fascist state and the passing of the hungry moments from sunrise to the deep profundity of night with its promise of another dawn eager for new labors, cannot be picked apart. I am lock-stitched into this fabric. It and myself are woven into one. Other men may find romance in the fluttering of the leaves on a bough; as for me, whatever I might have been, destiny and my own self have made me one whose eyes, ears, whose every sense, every thought, whose entire time, entire energy must be directed at the trunk of the tree of public life.
The poetry of my life has become the poetry of construction. The romance in my existence has become the romance of measures, policies, and the future of a state. These to me are redolent with drama.
So it is that as I look back over nearly six years of leadership I see the solution of problems, each of which is a chapter in my life and a chapter in the life of my country. A chapter, long or short, simple or complex, in the history of the advance and experimentation and pioneering of mankind.
I am not deeply concerned at being misunderstood. It is more or less trivial that conspiracies go on to misinterpret and, indeed, entirely to misrepresent what I have sought and why I have sought it. After all, I have been too busy to hear the murmurs of liars.
He who looks back over his shoulder toward those who lag and those who lie is a waster; it is because I cannot write my life—my daily life, my active life, my thinking life and even my own peculiar, emotional life—without recording the steps I have taken to renew Italy and find a new place for her in the general march of civilization, that I call up one after another the recollection of my recent battles over measures which submerge men, over policies which bury, under their simplicity and weight, everything else I might have lived.