I am fully aware that the value of Fascism, as an intellectual movement, baffles the minds of many of its followers and supporters and is denied outright by its enemies.  There is no malice in this denial, as I see it, but rather an incapacity to comprehend.  The liberal-democratic-socialistic ideology has so completely and for so long a time dominated Italian culture that in the minds of the majority of people trained by it, it has assumed the value of an absolute truth, almost the authority of a natural law.  Every faculty of self-criticism is suppressed in the minds and this suppression entails an incapacity for understanding that time alone can change.  It will be advisable therefore to rely mainly upon the new generations and in general upon persons whose culture is not already fixed.  This difficulty to comprehend on the part of those who have been thoroughly grounded by a different preparation in the political and social sciences explains in part why Fascism has not been wholly successful with the intellectual classes and with mature minds, and why on the other hand it has been very successful with young people, with women, in rural districts, and among men of action unencumbered by a fixed and set social and political education.  Fascism moreover, as a cultural movement, is just now taking its first steps.  As in the case with all great movements, action regularly outstrips thought.  It was thus at the time of the Protestant Reformation and of the individualistic reaction of the XVII and XVIII centuries.  The English revolution occurred when the doctrines of natural law were coming into being and the theoretical development of the liberal and democratic theories followed the French Revolution.

At this point it will not be very difficult to assign a fitting place in history to this great trend of thought which is called Fascism and which, in spite of the initial difficulties, already gives clear indication of the magnitude of its developments.

The liberal-democratic speculation both in its origin and in the manner of its development appears to be essentially a non-Italian formation.  Its connection with the Middle Ages already shows it to be foreign to the Latin mind, the mediaeval disintegration being the result of the triumph of Germanic individualism over the political mentality of the Romans.  The barbarians, boring from within and hacking from without, pulled down the great political structure raised by Latin genius and put nothing in its place.  Anarchy lasted eight centuries during which time only one institution survived and that a Roman one—­the Catholic Church.  But, as soon as the laborious process of reconstruction was started with the constitution of the great national states backed by the Roman Church the Protestant Reformation set in followed by the individualistic currents of the XVII and XVIII centuries, and the process of disintegration was started anew.  This anti-state tendency was the expression of the