to him.  In Sorel’s ideas they saw two things:  first, the end of a hypocritical “collaborationism” which betrayed both proletariat and nation; and second, faith in a moral and ideal reality for which it was the individual’s duty to sacrifice himself, and to defend which, even violence was justified.  The anti-parliamentarian spirit and the moral spirit of syndicalism brought Italian socialists back within the Mazzinian orbit.

Of great importance, too, was nationalism, a new movement then just coming to the fore.  Our Italian nationalism was less literary and more political in character than the similar movement in France, because with us it was attached to the old historic Right which had a long political tradition.  The new nationalism differed from the old Right in the stress it laid on the idea of “nation”; but it was at one with the Right in regarding the State as the necessary premise to the individual rights and values.  It was the special achievement of nationalism to rekindle faith in the nation in Italian hearts, to arouse the country against parliamentary socialism, and to lead an open attack on Freemasonry, before which the Italian bourgeoisie was terrifiedly prostrating itself.  Syndicalists, nationalists, idealists succeeded, between them, in bringing the great majority of Italian youth back to the spirit of Mazzini.

Official, legal, parliamentary Italy, the Italy that was anti-Mazzinian and anti-idealistic, stood against all this, finding its leader in a man of unfailing political intuition, and master as well of the political mechanism of the country, a man sceptical of all high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical, cold, hard-headed, practical—­what Mazzini would have called a “shrewd materialist.”  In the persons, indeed, of Mazzini and Giolitti, we may find a picture of the two aspects of pre-war Italy, of that irreconcilable duality which paralyzed the vitality of the country and which the Great War was to solve.

V

The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite sense—­to mark the beginning of a general debacle of the Italian State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State.  If entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter.  After the Armistice our Allies turned their backs upon us.  Our victory assumed all the aspects of a defeat.  A defeatist psychology, as they say, took possession of the Italian people and expressed itself in hatred of the war, of those responsible for the war, even of our army which had won our war.  An anarchical spirit of dissolution rose against all authority.  The ganglia of our economic life seemed struck with mortal disease.  Labor ran riot in strike after strike.  The very bureaucracy seemed to align itself against the State.  The measure of our spiritual dispersion was the return to power of Giolitti—­the execrated Neutralist—­who for five years had been held up as the exponent of an Italy which had died with the war.