No More Learning

" Yes," said the Padre, " we feel it, and we are all of us going back," i. e. , to Spain.
London was in terror of thought. Nothing was being buried. Paris was tired, very tired, but they wanted table rase, they wanted the dead things cleared out even if there were nothing to replace them.
Italy was, on the other hand, full of bounce. I said all of this to a Lombard writer. I said: London is dead, Paris is tired, but here the place is alive. What they don't know is plenty, but there is some sort of animal life here. If you put an idea into these people they would DO something.
The Lombard writer said yes . . . and looked across the hotel lobby; finally he said: " And you know it is terrible to be surrounded by all this energy and . . . and . . . not to have an idea to put into it. "
I think that must have been I92. o. I can't remem- ber which year contained what, possibly in '2. I the cavalieri della motte passed through the Piazza San Marco, and when I got to Milan that year I asked
? so JEFFERSON
my friend what about it. What is this fa$cio? He said there was nothing to it or words to that effect. At any rate not a matter of interest.
Y ou know how it is when you stop off for a night in a hurry and haven't much left but a ticket to where you've got :to get back to. Or perhaps that was the year when one was lucky to get there at all. I did go out via Chiasso by tramway but I suspect' that was 1920 and that in 'zx or 'zz or whatever spring it was, I hadn't any excuse save an interest in other matters and the supposition that IF it were interesting my friend would have known it.
It may be, of course, that one's intuition takes in the whole, and sees straight, whereas one's verbal receiving-station or one's logic deals with stray detail, and that one's intuition can't get hold of the particular, or anything particular, but only of the whole.
Let it stand that I was right in my main perception but that any stray remark or any wisp of straw blowing? nowhere could fool me as to the particular point of focus.
Say I hadn't a nose for news. Why should I have had? One may learn several trades in a lifetime but one can't learn 'em all, all at once.
And if I had gone then to the Popolo d'Italia I don't the least know that I would now have any better sense of the specific weight of the fascio. I might have got lost in a vast welter of detail.
What I saw was the line of black shirts, and the tense faces of cavalieri della morte. I was at Florian's. Suddenly a little old buffer rushed up to a front table and began to sputter forty-eight to the dozen: " chubbuchcuchushcushcushcuhkhh. " Vio- lent protests etc. , "wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't. " It was a different kind of excitement, a more acri-
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monious excitement than the noise of the midday pigeon-feeding.
Then came the ? le of young chaps with drawn faces and everyone stood to attention and took off their hats about something, all exc::ept one stubborn foreigner, damned if he would stand up or show respect until he knew what they meant. Nobody
hit me with a club and I didn't see any oil bottles. Life was interesting in Paris from 1921 to 1924, nobody bothered much about Italy. Some details I never heard of at all until I saw the Esposizione
del Decennia.
Communists took over some factories, but
couldn't dispense with credit. No one has told us whether ANY Italian communist even thought of the subject.
Lenin couldn't, after all, be both in Turin and in Moscow.
Gabriele declined to obey the stuffed plastrons of Paris, Marinetti made a few remarks in the Chamber. It can't be said that the outer world cared. When one got back to Italy things were in order, that is, up to a point.
I heard an alarm bell in Ravenna. A lady who had long known the Duce complained about Itruy's being Prussianized one day when a train started on time.
The Tyrolean bellboy or boots or factotum at Sirmione ran up the tricolour topside downward on a feast day, either from irridentism or because he didn't know t'other from which. Nobody noticed it save the writer. You don't go to Italy for criticism, there is a lack of minute observation
- I mean when Giovanni isn't being punctilious or having his sensibilities ruffled. . . .
" Noi altri Italiani," said one medico, " we don't
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pay attention like that to EVERY word. n This was during a discussion on style (in writing).
And another year I went down to Sicily.
Lady X was worried about the work in the sul- phur mines. The Duce had been there, but he had been steered into and through the one decent mine in the place. . . .
? XI
F O R several years the general lack of mental cohererl:ce in the anti-fascists, all every and any anti-fascist I encountered, increased my respect for the fascio. Apart from the Rimini man, I don't think I knew any fascists.
One year the son of the proprietor in Cesena gave me the usual Cola da Rienzi oration, at the end of which he drew a picture of Mazzini from his pocket and ecstatically kissed it.
The Comandante della Piazza considered this act due to ignorance. Gigi aged two used to stand up on his chair after lunch and say " Popolo ignoranteI " as a sort of benediction, one day he added the personal note " And th! worst of all is my nurse. "
Then there were a few days in Modena before an anniversary of the martyrs. Posters stating the number o f martyrs. Proclamations from Farinacci
? indicating that the proper way to remember the martyrs was to beat up all the working men in the district. I think this went on for two days or possibly longer up till the evening before " the day. " Then there appeared a little strip of paper on the walls, a little strip about eighteen inches by four, to the effect:
The secretary of the Party is compelled to remain in Rome by press of official business.
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I think it was even briefer. It was signed "Mussolini. "
When thinking of revolution, you must think of several revolutions. I know about two from Stef and about the shindy in Ireland. . . . I can't afford Spanish car fare.
? XII
GOVERNMENT BY THEORY OR BY INTELLIGENCE
JEFFERSON . did not have the Vatican in his garden, he did not have the Roman aristocracy in hisgarden. Imakenopretencetodirectknowledge of the Roman aristocracy, my contact having been for some years limited to one prince who is unim- pressed thereby, and to a few other meetings on tennis courts. The prince's opinion: " Roman societyI ANYbody can get into. Roman society, all you got to do is to HANG OUT a HAMI "
One hears stories about Roman society, a Proust- less congeries, museum pieces o f immemorial tradition, American sustenance of the Edwardian and Victorian periods.
Years ago in the pastoral epoch they used to play polo, quite good but very cheap polo using one pony a whole afternoon, then there came an American millionaire ambassadOr and he used three or four thoroughbreds all at once and rode all round the patricians, and that, roughly speaking, ended polo for the Romans who couldn't afford the new method.
And there is Prince X who is said to cast off the thin peel of fine tailoring once he gets back to his estates, and to be a fellow-barbarian among his own peasants, etc.
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On the whole my impression, worth no more than any one else's impression, is that this subdivided and resubdivided small world hovers between the chapel roof and the cocktail-shaker, some of the senior members having very beautiful, if sometimes vacuous, manners and some ofthe young, none at all.
In no case can it be considered a milieu for ideas, that is to say for active and living ideas as opposed to trrrrraditions. Some parts of it must be about as level-headed as the sur-realists in private life.
Into the vicinage of these black papalists and these by-New York refurnished entitleds came the son of a blacksmith, a chap who had edited a terrible left-wing paper, a fellow who had worked eleven hours a day in Lausanne for thirty-two centesimi the hour (pre-War, when 32. centesimi were wonh six and a fraction cents).
It was very disturbing. I don't think the Roman milieu is as idiotic as Bloomsbury or as wafty as the Nouvelle Revue Frans;aise, but this is purely per- sonal distortion. I know more about the drivelling idiocy of those more nonhern milieux. In all such monkey gardens conversation is two-thirds deni- gration, petty yatter about irrelevant flaws, and demarcation between the ouistitis who write most of the Criterion, or who form chapels wherever there can be gathered together a few hundred or a few dozen idle people who are emphatically NOT anists, but who give themselves importance by hanging on to the edge of artistic reputations or
social notorieties, is always this niggling over the minor defect and this failing utterly to weigh up any work or any man as an entirety, balancing major with minor.
As to the kind of thing: The Duke of Xq was in the cabinet and brought in a law which the boss
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said was tyrannous and oppressive, oppressive to the working man, so the boss rewrote it a week or so later; not, I believe, as a law for an ideal republic situated in a platonic paradise but as an arrangement possible in Italy in the year VIII or IX of the Era Fascista, that is to say a much milder law than the Duke's, whereon the Duke was peeved like any other contributor to an amateur vers fibre monthly or any other young schoolgirl, and announced that he was a defender of popular liberties and resigned
from the cabinet, and anybody who knew anybody who knew or spoke weii of the government was regarded as a member of the Cheka.
? XIII CUL TURE
THERE is a lot of" culture" in Italy, bywhich? I mean people with social position write one or two books. And there was another Duke whom my friend the more or less known author G defined as a cretino. He had nice manners. I found out, after a time, that he was a very Catholic Catholic, I mean very pious according to some mysterious criterion ; one day I inadvertently said a good word about the government, not to him but to his wife. I have never seen him since then.
Titles in Italy might perhaps puzzle the just- arrived foreigner. Roughly speaking, princes and dukes are "in society" and live lives of, let us say, luxury and ease or at any rate of varying splendour as judged by professors and working men.
The rank of Cavaliere seems to be allotted mainly to dentists and to photographers. A very com- petent and charming hairdresser well-known in this vicinage was a Marchese but didn't use his title in business. Count Romulus of Begni is a hotel- keeper in a mountain town of about 900 inhabitants, sort of, as you might say, maintained, helped on by his friends who feel his position ought to be kept up for the village credit.
But Italian snobism is multiform by comparison with that in long-centralized countries, it doesn't
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all scale down in neat categories from a half-witted royalty at the top, or from a couple of mouldy groups of Bourbonists and Orleanists, etc. , as in the cheesy districts of Paris.
In occasional spare moments I have tried in vain to follow a few of its shades and nuances and to understand why and where that which fancies itself as noble don't mingle with higher plutocracy or with other people with excellent breeding, and the eternal mystery of the accessibility of all privileged classes to idiots and to sycophants.
FIRST SHOCK:
Fascism is probab! J the first anti-snob movement that has occu"ed in this peninsula since the dt! Js of Cato the
younger.
On the other hand there is definitely so much
culture in the serious sense of that word in Italy. There is the scholarly class, the people with set habits and an acquaintance with a small amount of catalogued and evalued literature, and a question- able taste in old painting, etc. In every town you will find people still browsing on the hang-over of the Renaissance, but self-contained, having dis- missed the vanities of social glamour, exchanging a few words or not exchanging a few words in small cafes, living dignifiedly o n invisible incomes, etc. . . .
But as further complication: These sensitive kindly professors who have never affirmed any- thing in their lives, who are possibly too cultured to make an affirmation, or too polite to risk stating an opinion that might jostle their colloquitor, are on the other hand remarkably set, stubborn, un- movable.
They have never asked anyone else to change an
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opinion and had never expected to change one of their own.
Scholarship has led them into a realm of uncer- tainty, or to a remote grove where contradictions are needless. This doesn't apply simply to museum pieces of seventy but to the men of my own genera- tion. Theolderonesaremoremildandtheyounger more rigid but the ? ixity is impartially divided between them.
If Mussolini had committed the error of getting into an Italian university there would have been no fascist decennial.
? XIV WHY ITALY?
I T A L Y , for the very simple reason that after the great infamy there was no other clot of energy in Europe capable of opposing ANY FORCE WHA T- EVER to the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men's blood for money.
England grovelled in an utter terror, flat on her belly before banks and bankers' touts. The Press lied, economic discussion was taboo, though a huge camouflage of mystification was kept up by licensed economists.
That banks had power in Italy no one will be so naive as to deny, but in no other cranny of Europe was there ANY other power whatever save the power of the gombeen man.
Corbaccio has at last brought out a volume on gu1:1,-sellers, putting a name and a date and a detail on what " we " have known for some time.
I don't at the moment know e~ctly which who is ? related to what who or which French nitroglycerine
profiteer is a relative of the wife of von Papen.
Or whether England has been sending money to Krupp for munitions received in time for the late shindy or what the British diplomat said at Doorn,
but I do know that there are a great number of public inen who would rtot take any trouble to put an end to such doings, or who would excuse them- 6x
? 6z JEFFERSON
selves on the grounds that they hadn't the power or " weren't authorized " or hadn't received instruc- tions.
JEFFERSON was guyed as a doctrinaire. It is difficult to see what doctrine covers his " Embargo " unless it be the doctrine that when an unforeseen emergency arises one should try to understand it and meet it.
The truth is that Jefferson used verbal formula- tions as tools. He was not afflicted by fixations. Neither he nor Mussolini has been really inter- ested in governmental machinery. That is not paradox, they have both invented it and used it, but they have both been much more deeply inter- ested in something else.
Jefferson found himself in a condition of things that had no precedent in any remembered world. He saw like a shot that a new system and new
mechanisms MUST come into being to meet it. He was agrarian IN the colonies and in the U. S. A. of HIS TIME, that is to say a time when, and a place where, there was abundance and super-
abundance of land.
In Europe there wasn't enough land, not so much
in the REAL sense of the land not being there but in the sense that it wasn't available for public needs. IT WAS OWNED.
There existed a problem of distribution in America though nobody called it that.
" Everyone " thought it would be a good thing for the land to become productive.
What's the difference for the sake of a political emergency between an over-abundance and an over- production which rapidly produces an over-abund- ance?
And what does one DO when faced with either?
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Our forefathers pa'acel'd out the land but took no precautions about keeping it pa'acel'd.
And after a due lapse of time people found out that land needed labour, Mr. Marx of Germany was the most persistently loud and outspoken about labour.
Marx found it was needed for " everything," and that from it proceeded all value.
There is a French song which considerably ante- dates Marx, it says that there is no king, prince, or duke but lives by the effort of the labourer (labourellf' in that song indicating mainly the peasant plough- man, as can be proved by the context). ,
. But J~ffer~on saw J? achin~ry in th~ offing, he didn't like 1t, he didn't like the 1dea of the factory.
H you are hunting up bonds of sympathy between T. J. and the Duce; put it first that they both hate machinery or at any rate the idea of cooping up men and making 'em all into UNITS, unit produc-
. tion, denting in the individual man, reducing him to a mere amalgam.
Possibly in Mussolini's case it dates from his having been caught for a time under the heel of the mastodon; pushing his car in Lausanne, and seeing the country lads jammed into factories.
Both he and T. J. had sympathy with the beasts.
They still plough with oxen in Italy and they say that the sentimental foreigner with his eye for the picturesque and the classic scholar who likes to be reminded of Virgil, etc. , are not at the root of it. The bm IS indisputably simpatico. I don't believe even Marinetti can help liking the sight of a pair of grey oxen scrunching along under olive-trees, or lugging -a plough up an almost vertical hillside. Tfiere are plenty of fields in Italy where a tractor
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would be little use and larger farm machinery no economy.
However, the Duce is capable, as T. J. was capable, of putting a prejudice or a sentiment in his pocket. He has looked over a few model factories, he is all for machinery when it means machines in the open air in suitable places, as for boniftca, draining of swamps.
Neither he nor T. J. was interested in, nor bam- boozled by, money. That gives us three common denominators or possibly four: agriculture, sense of the " root and the branch," readiness to scrap . the lesser thing for the thing of major importance, indifference to mechanism as weighed against the main purpose, fitting of the means to that purpose
without regard to abstract ideas, even if the idea was proclaimed the week before last.
Jefferson was denounced as vacillating. A man who plugs after a main purpose for sixty years is no more vacillating than a general who wins a campaign by keeping his light troops mobile. Opportunist? RightlyopportunistI
The bad, or in the deeper sense, the silly oppor- tunism is that of Churchill.
Shane Leslie was greatly bedazzled by his stout cousin Winston. He wrote a book to tell it to dh' woild. Winston once said to Leslie apropos of thinking and having ideas (in the sense of making ideas for oneself): " Don't waste your time making munitions, be a GUN and shoot off other people's munitions. "
Leslie, as a journalist, of sorts, was overwhelmed by this brilliance. Both cousins are half-breed Americans, determined to succeed, just like the cheapest of Mr. Lorimer's heroes.
Yeats, who was personally impressed by Churchill
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as a table companion, and who found him so much more interesting than Lloyd George or the other British politicians, was puzzled, at least for a number of years, because Winston didn't somehow get to the top ; and has more or less faded out of the picture, even though Winston's charming mother used to tell people that Winston had got out the fleet (August 1914).
In shorta GUN, a BIG GUN pointed at nothing.
On the other hand Jefferson meant it, and the Romagnol has a meaning. With all the superficial differences that could very well be in this world neither T. J. nor B. M. is a Gongorist, i. e. one who obscures the whole by the detaifs.
Jefferson as a lawyer and as a law scholar used legalities and legal phrases as IMPLEMENTS, Mussolini as an ex-editor uses oratory, and by comparison with Italian habits of speech (" these damned Eyetalyan intellexshuls that think they are still contemporaries of Metastasio "), that oratory
? is worth study.
It is as different from Lenin's as the crags of
Zoagli are from the Siberian steppe. It is alter- natively gentle and expanded as the etc. . . . plains of Apulia, and abrupt as the Ligurian coast. And if one takes it from the spoken news-reel, one sees that it differs from town to town. For the guy knows his eggs and his Italy. The speech at Forli was at Forli and not at Torino.
? XV
T H E SECRET OF THE DUCE is possibly the capacity to pick out the element of immediate and_ major importance in any tangle; or, in the case of a man, to go straight to the centre, for the fellow's major interest. " Why do you want to put your ideas in order? "
Jefferson was all over the shop, discursive, interested in everything: to such an extent that he even wrote a long rambling essay on metric. He was trying to set? up a civilization in the wilderness, he measured the Maison Carree, sent over Boudin to America, and thought it would be better not to sculp Washington in a fancy dress costume.
Mussolini found himself in the cluttered rubbish and cluttered splendour of the dozen or more strata of human effort: history, the romanesque cluttered over with barocco, every possible sort of refinement, dust-covered, sub-divided, passive, scep- tical, lazy, caressed by milleniar sun, Rome, Byzan- tium, Homeric Greece still in Sicily, belle au bois dormante; full of habits, brittle in mind, or say: half of 'em brittle, and the other half having fire- cracker mentality, sputter-and-bang enthusiasm, all over in thirteen seconds.
All right, bo', you come along with a card-deck, set card for each clot of theories, demo-liberal, bolshevik, anti-clerical, etc. , and make that junk-
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shop into a nation, a live nation on its toes like a young bull in the Cordova ring.
I have seen several admirable shows in my time. I saw groggy old England get up onto her feet from 1914 to '18. I don't like wars, etc. . . . but given the state of decadence and comfort and general incompetence in pre-\Var England, nobody who saw that effort can remain without respect for England. :. during-that-war.
I am not contradicting myself. Respect for that honest heave and effort has nothing to do with the state of utter dithering deliquescence into which England slopped in 1919.
I like to see a man do something I can't. I like to see Brancusi settle a form in stone, or Picabia show up half a year's work by Picasso with a few apparently effortless twists of the pen.
All of which is accentuated by my contempt at the sight of some bloater with great position either stalling or avoiding the point or being just too god-damned stupid or too superficially silly to understand something that is put plumb bang in front of him, and which if he weren't just a low- down, common, yaller hound dog he would look at and having seen would act on his knowledge.
It is one of my lasting regrets that I didn't when I had the chance, show up Mr. Balfour. That's the curse of having had some sort of a bringing up and of not having? escaped it. It was, I think, the first time I had seen the great Arthur and I was the youngest man in the room, and I was the only man not in a swaller-tail coat . . . so I was modest and wellbehaved . . . ? oratanyrateactedthatway . . . I also looked at the audience and couldn't see any- one there who was the least likely to understand what I had ready to tell 'em.
? XVI
W H O IS worth meeting?
A decade or so ago when I was settling into
Paris I more or less unconsciously drifted on to, you can't say this question, but I was talking to Bran~usi with the undefined aim of ascertaining more or less . . . etc. . . .
And he said of Leger, we weren't talking of anyone's painting, but he said: "11 sait vivre. "
And years later he said ofa group ofunsatisfactory people: "Ils sont empoisonnes de la gloire. " Which I suppose you can translate, " poisoned by
a desire to get reputations. "
"C'est toujours le beau monde qui gouvenie. " The people who know how to live are, so far as
my personal existence and contacts have been con- cerned, mainly great artists (writers, any kind of constructors) or else artists of conspicuous honesty who go their road with that sincerity which is supposed to govern all the work of the scientists.
That is to say they are interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal considerations, personal petty vanities and so on.
Such impersonality seems to me implicit in fascism, in the idea statale.
Given the technical advance, the modem 1933 world of anno XI dell'era Jascista, the known facts and equations of economics, the known results of certain actions and restrictions of currency, etc.
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I have this morning (February I rth) tried to make a " law " or equation covering the new drive in politics or to state the enlightened aim of the differently labelled INTELLIGENT drives and drifts of the present.
I. When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the people who need it.
(I would very nearly say: " and even to those who merely want to use or consume it, with the emphasis on the last pair of verbs. )
II. It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.
(This is akin to the Confucian idea that you achieve the good of the world by FIRST achieving good government IN your own country. )
III. When potential production (possible pro- duction) of anything is sufficient to meet everyone's needs it is the business of the government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.
Note that in America when there was plenty and more than plenty of land, our government handed it out despite Quincy Adams's protests.
This third idea becomes an " idea statale " when I say "it is the business of the government. "
But note that Mussolini is NOT a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen's nose and monkey with the individual's diet. IF, when and whenever the individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state
WANTS the industry and the individual to DO it, and it is only in case of sheer idiocy, incapacity or simple greed and dog-in-the-mangerness that the state . intervenes to protect the unorganized PEOPLE; public; you me and the other fellow.
The rest is political "machinery," bureaucracy,
? 70 JEFFERSON and/or MUSSOLINI
flummyd. iddle. Jefferson, Mussolini, Lenin, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get rid of it: "All this is political machinery, want to get rid of it," as Stef reported Lenin's opinion in 1918.
Jefferson started to clean up the social flummy- d. iddle, etiquette, precedence, etc. ?
In a hide-bound Italy, fascism meant at the start DIRECT action, cut the cackle, if a man is a mere s. o. b. don't argue.
Get it into your head that Italy was, even in 1900, immeasurably ahead of England in so far as land laws and the rights of the man who works on the soil are concerned. Some of the follies and cruelties of great English owners would not now be permitted in Italy. Certain kinds of domestic enemy would be shipped to the conjino.
You can buy and own pretty villas and ancient architectural triumphs, but you can't cut down olive- trees just when you like and you can't drive the " co,lonno " off his fields. He can, I think, still be your " colonno " instead of the " colonno " of the former proprietor, but you don't by any means own him despite the feudal decorations or courtesy.
Secular habit, picturesque, etc. , as in the case of "the sailor. '~ There is, near here, an ancient villa, and a nabob therein, and "the sailor" just came and sat in the kitchen where there was plenty of room, he adopted the villa, and he ulti- mately adopted the chauffeur's seat, etc. That don't prove anything about anything except certain phases of mentality. Servants ask twice as much from people with big houses as from people with cottages and small flats. Primitive sense of equity and justice or Latin common-sense.
? XVII
AS TO THE PARTICULAR SITUATION AND THE VIOLA TION OF LIBERTIES, TRADI- TIONAL LIBERTIES, "RIGHTS," ETC.
JEFFERSON had no difficulty about keeping MEN in his country, in fact he found it difficult to imagine A N Yone leaving America for Europe (Napoleonic and Royal Europe). When a particular emergency arose he showed no regard for liberties in the declaration of EMBARGO.
Mussolini found himself faced with the inverse situation. Italians had for decades been going abroad to work, they sent back " money " but that did NOT tidy up Italy, it did not drain swamps, improve crops, restore buildings that had been knocked cock-eyed by Napoleon, by the Austrians, and by nature the gradual destroyer ofroofs.
In particular France was sucking in the best blood of Italy. Germany noticed it, Germany naturally. thought France might as well fill up on more or less consanguineous Germans, rather than on Italians who were wanted at home and on natives from the African continent.
Mussolini saw labour going out of Italy to rebuild France and, still worse, to provide soldiers who would, as soon as the Comite des Forges could wangle it, be ready to provide a home-market for Creusot cannon to shoot no matter whom so long
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? 72 JEFFERSON
as they created consumption of metallurgical pro- ducts.
Gents who make guns like to sell 'em; such is the present state of the world, in the bourgeois demo- liberal anti-Marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system.
And as the Stampa correspondent has indicated, the selling of guns and powder differs from ALL other industries in that the more you sell the greater the demand for the product. The more goes to consumer A the greater the demand of the other consumers. Hence the love, the loving and tender love of banks for munition works.
France by the so-called peace got a lot of nice iron, nicely there in the ground, to be dug up for profit, and nobody in the Schneider family con- sidered it wrong to want to sell iron, as quickly and as extensively as possible.
Hence the Italian embargo on the Italian popu- lation which has for ten years been improving the olde home yard.
Nobody loathes passports more than the present writer, but passports for a purpose are a vastly different matter from passports shoved on to the American people with no shadow of justification whatsoever at an enormous cost to the American public and as, indirectly, a means of presenting American millions of dollars to foreign and often unfriendly nations for NO cause save the funda- mental nastiness of several disreputable or half- witted presidents one ? of whom was THE record- breaking destroyer o f the best American institutions ; and with no excuse save the half-wittedness of an unthinking and incompetent bureaucracy. ?
They weren't meant to keep Americans at home for the good of America, they were just a useless annoyance because a diseased president with a one-
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track mind liked to show his authority (and didn't care a damn whether his authority was legal or not) and because pus in one part of a government system tends to produce pustulence throughout that system.
Back of Jefferson's embargo and of Mussolini's there was a will for the good of their nations.
In neither man of genius was preconception or theory strong enough to blind the leader to the immediate need.
Even the question o f the efficiency o f the measures doesn't arise.
Most historians seem to tend to believe that Jefferson's embargo may have done more good than harm, there is no shadow of a doubt whatsoever that Mussolini's embargo has done what the leader intended.
No one denies the material and immediate effect: grano, bonifica, reJtauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restor- ations, new buildings, and, I am ready to add off my own bat, AN A W AKENED INTELLIGENCE
in the nation and a new LANGUAGE in th~ debates in the Chamber.
? XVIII
A L L right, go to the House of Commons for a display of gas, evasion, incompetence, and then read the Stampa's rep<;>rt for 8th January or when- ever it was, of Italians getting up and saying what they meant with clarity and even with brevity, or at any rate not stalling and beating about the bush.
And even here is the hand or eye or ear of the Duce, the Debunker par excellence, for the deputies and ministers know that there is an EDITORIAL eye and ear-precisely-an editor, who will see through their bunkum and for whom they will go to the scrap-basket just as quickly as an incompetent reporter's c. opy will go to the basket in a live editorial office.
As personal testimony to PERSONAL feeling, I feel freer here than I ever did in London or Paris. I am willing to admit my capacity for illusion, but right or wrong, that is my feeling. And as an act or declaration of faith, I do NOT BELIEVE that any constructive effort has been ham-strung in this country since the Marcia su Roma.
As to thought and letters: the Bolsheviki have never been able to live up to the declaration that even they want to permit " fellow-passengers," they have proclaimed that literature is for the state, but they don't mean it as, let us say, I do. I believe that any precise use of words is bound in the long run to be useful to the state and the world at large.
74
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 7S
The Duce comes out to meet one in his puncturing of the pretences of party careerists.
Speaking to fascist writers: " A membership ticket in this party does not confer genius on the holder. " He was speaking in particular of literary and journalistic ability.
A decent concept of a twentieth century world is like the decent concept of a town or a family, you don't want your neighbour down with cholera; you don't want your family full of sickly members all yowling for help. You don't want the cells in your muscles all squshy and some so weak that one cell grips over and gets out of hand.
If anyone holds the long-distance record for common-sense, that man is Confucius. And the concept I have in mind is: benefit of the world by n;eans ofgood INTERNAL GOVERNMENT of the country.
A squshy and unstable state, particularly in the Italian peninsula, is not an aid to the health of Europe.
A state strung along the Atlantic sea-board in I Soo with an enormous unoccupied hinterland was a very different kettle of onions.
But the types of mind fitted to deal with either, and with unexpected situations in either, are types which may have a very deep kinship which you may perceive if you can but sort out the likenesses underlying.
The shortsighted squeal, they always squeal except when they are being diddled or hypnotized.
? XIX
D U R I N G the past twenty years the fundamental capacities of humanity for supplying itse~ with everything it wants have changed at a geometrical ratio outsoaring anything previous man had guessed at.
Just as the quantity of fertile available land had soared out of the previous bounds of human imagination when Europe had a new continent thrown into her silly lap, and proceeded to play the god-damned drivelling fool, first with a grab for metal that annihilated the Incas, then with a gamble for "colonies," i. e. , vast tracts that no nation in Europe at that time was organized to manage.
The putrid idiocy of eighteenth-century European governments is something no normal man can imagine until he has waded through a hundred volumes of the history of that period. The kings and ministers of that day were as idiotic as Otto Kahn or the last Czar of the several Russias, and they saw equally NOT AT ALL into the present.
TEMPERAMENT
I know why my friend the urbane and far more
than distinguished jurisconsult is worried, sincerely worried and distressed by fascismo. - He has the elegiac mind: as per his " the mistake of my genera. . tion was . .