Certainly I know that I took the direction of the government when the central power of the state was sinking to the bottom. We had a financial situation that Peano of the Liberal party had summarized with an astounding figure: six billions of deficit! Individually the people fed on expedients. Progressive inflation and the printing presses gave to everybody the old illusion of prosperity. It created an unstable delusion of well-being; it excited a fictitious game of interests. All this had to be expiated when faced by the severe Fascist financial policy.
Abroad our political reputation had diminished progressively. We were judged as a nation without order and discipline, unable either to prosper or produce. The chronic infection of disorder had withdrawn from us the sympathies of countries better equipped than we were. Worse yet, it had increased the haughtiness and the contempt of many of our enemies.
The Italian school system, in its complex formation, university, middle and lower schools, had turned its energies into purely abstract, theoretical functions; it had withdrawn more and more from a real world, a modern world, and from the fundamental problems of national life; it had been inert as a guide to civil duties. Schools and pulpits should always show the way to ascending peoples.
There still lived, in the national mechanism, strange and hateful regional political formations; these used to bring our solidarity into question, if not into peril. The activities of the government in terms of services, improvements and appropriations were guided and affected, not by real natural necessities, but by the desire to ingratiate this or that population, or region. The treasury was tapped by this base policy of politics—electoral strategy.
A bureaucracy already suffering from elephantiasis increased its distention, generating that spirit of trouble, those characters of instability, of intolerance, of slight love of duty, which are typical of all great accumulations of functionaries, especially when the latter are not well paid, and do not see their moral prestige supported and built up by the authority of the state and by precise and clear definition of individual responsibility.
We still had, as a consequence of our generous struggle, the Fascist squadron formations. They might become, in the new conditions of life, a danger threatening public order and legality.
The army and the navy lived apart from the great problems of national life. As a matter of fact, though this is good in many respects, it is not good when they are set aside in an almost humiliated formation. Aviation was in disorder. It was difficult to give it new strength. One must not forget, when considering aviation, that Nitti had forbidden flight, not only for military planes, but also for private planes. His command was to demobilize aviation, and to sell the motors as well as the airplanes. It was a kind of premeditated murder of a nation which really did not want to be strangled.
In the meantime there assembled in Rome all the arms and legs of anti-Fascism, in all its gradations. The political parties, at first dismayed by the revolution of the Black Shirts and my advent to power, began to revive. They began to find courage to pursue again the general trend of political parties in the equivocal atmosphere of the parliamentary corridors at Montecitorio. The Italian press was, for the greater part, tied to old groups and to old political customers.
It was necessary to reorganize all civil life, without forgetting the basic need of a supervisory force. It was necessary to give order to political economy, to the schools, to our military strength. It was necessary to abolish double functions, to reduce bureaucracy, to improve public services. It was necessary to check the corrosion and erosion of criticism by the remnants of the old political parties. I had to fight external attacks. I had to refine and improve Fascism. I had to divide and floor the enemies. I saw the vision that I must in every respect work to improve and to give tone to all the manners and customs of Italian political life.
It was also imperative not to neglect the ten millions of Italians emigrated beyond the frontiers. We had to give faith again to the zones on our borders. We had to assist in bringing modern improvements and stimuli to the life of the southern regions, and to get in touch with all the men of the healthy and strong provinces, wherever they were.