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understand is that these fascist dictators are popular dictators, bywhich I mean dictators who, though by no means loved by thepeople, nevertheless hold their power through them. They aredemagogic dictators as distinguished from purely military dictators.The regime includes a group of social and economic ingredientswithout which the dictatorships could never have been establishedand without which they could not have lasted so long.There is a whole library of pamphlets, books, and orations producedto prove that fascism was caused by the Treaty of Versaillesor by the greed or stupidity of Britain and France, or by the ingrownwickedness of the German or the supine âabbiness of theItalian, by anti-Semitism or munitions profiteers, by the conspiraciesof business magnates or the rising hatred of the free worldof the scholar. Yet fascism grew up in Italy without any push fromanti-Semitism and it flourishedthere before it did in Germany, whichis supposed to be the peculiar victim of Versailles. It has made itsappearance in Greece and the Slavic Balkans as well as in "Nordic"Germany and Latin Italy and in Portugal where there were nomunitions magnates to stir the broth.You may hear any day angry discussions of the course of eventsin Washington. You will hear ardent New Dealers assert that thegovernment is building a great buttress around the crumbling wallsof democracy. Others tell you, with equal assurance, that the orderbeing fashioned there is obviously National Socialism, while stillothers are quite as sure that it is communistic. Certainly it cannotbe all these things. It is, I fear, reasonably certain that most of thosewho damn the present Washington regime look upon it as Red—andtake Mr. Dies's revelations of the number of Communist partymembers and fellow* travelers who have penetrated the bureaus asevidence that we are on our way to bolshevism. The fears of thesecritics are very much alive, and they grow in virulence. Yet wecannot afford to be in doubt about the real meaning and directionof our policies.If we have any doubt, therefore, about what fascism is we woulddo well to resolve them. And the best way to do that is to examineit in the land where it began. If we will look at it in Italy, how itrose, what produced it, and what it in. turn created as a system of3