I felt lighter, fresher. I was free! I was better prepared to fight my battles than when I was bound by the dogmas of any political organization. But I understood that I could not use with efficient strength my convictions if I was without that modern weapon, capable of all possibilities, ready to arm and to help, good for offense and defense—the newspaper.
I needed a daily paper. I hungered for one. I gathered together a few of my political friends who had followed me in the last hard struggle and we held a war council. When money alone is concerned, I am anything but a wizard. When it is a question of means or of capital to start a project, or how to finance a newspaper, I grasp only the abstract side, the political value, the spiritual essence of the thing. To me, money is detestable; what it may do is sometimes beautiful and sometimes noble.
A few friends, bristling with ideas and ardent with faith, almost immediately found small rooms, garret-like, in the narrow street of Paolo da Cannobio, near the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. Near by there was a printing establishment. Its owner agreed to publish our newspaper at a small cost. I was mad to tell Italy and Italians the truth—their opportunity!
We had no need for great means. We wanted a newspaper that would hold the city of Milan like a fortress, with editorial articles of such value that they would be reprinted or quoted by every Italian newspaper.
Thus—and how dramatically!—the number of our readers would be multiplied. That was my passion. Our offices were quickly furnished with a desk and a few chairs. I can never cease to have affection for that intellectual dugout, the journalistic trenches from which I began to fight. A contract was signed with the printing establishment—a contract that every week was in danger of smashing for the lack of the few thousand lire needed to pay our weekly expense. But we were living on an idea.
On November 15, 1914, the first number of the Popolo d’Italia appeared. Even now I call this new paper my most cherished child. It was only through it, small as was its beginning, that I was able to win all the battles of my political life. I am still its director.
I could write and I may write a thousand memories of this newspaper which was born in 1914 and remained my platform up to 1922. It was an instrument for the making of me. The name of the Popolo d’Italia will occur over and over again. Its story in any case may be told through my personality as a political man, as a newspaper man, as a believer in this war, as a soldier, as an Italian and as a Fascist.
My first article in the Popolo d’Italia turned a large part of public opinion toward the intervention of Italy in the war, side by side with France and England.
Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals. There were professional men too—and the workingmen who could still hear the real voice of the country.
And now, while Italy remained out of the war, our first legions of volunteers were organized and went to France to fight. In the Argonne fell the two sons of Ricciotti Garibaldi, Bruno and Costante, nephews of the great Garibaldi, who conquered North Sicily and Naples for United Italy. The funeral of the two heroes took place in Rome and had solemn echoes all over Italy. Again the red shirts, once distinguished as the saviors of Italy, now in the land of France, testified to the indestructibility of Latinity.