It was quite like him. He decides quickly and completely.
So he began. He dictated. I advised that method because when he attempts to write in longhand he corrects and corrects and corrects. It would have been too much for him. So he dictated. The copy came back and he interlined the manuscript in his own hand—a dash of red pencil, and a flowing rivulet of ink—here and there.
When the manuscripts began to come to me I was troubled because mere literal translators lose the vigor of the man himself.
“What editing may I do?” I asked him.
“Any that you like,” he said. “You know Italy, you understand Fascism, you see me, as clearly as any one.”
But there was nothing much to do. The story came through as it appears here. It is all his and—what luck for all of us—so like him! Approve of him or not, when one reads this book one may know Mussolini or at least, if one’s vision is clouded, know him better. Like the book or not, there is not an insincere line in it. I find none.
Of course there are many things which a man writing an autobiography cannot see about himself or will not say about himself.
He is unlikely to speak of his own size on the screen of history.
Perhaps when approval or disapproval, theories and isms, pros and cons, are all put aside the only true measure of a man’s greatness from a wholly unpartisan view-point may be found in the answer to this question:
“How deep and lasting has been the effect of a man upon the largest number of human beings—their hearts, their thoughts, their material welfare, their relation to the universe?”