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national life, we cannot possibly be in doubt about what it is. Itwas in Italy where it was first established, where it reached its fullflower and had its longest experience. If we will look at it there wecan isolate its essential elements. And when we do this we will perceivethat its roots run deep and long through the very structure ofthat society; that they are roots not indigenous to Italy but are tobe found in all Western societies.What follows, therefore, is not a history of fascism or the storyof Mussolini's rise to power, but rather a search for the elements ofthis outrageous growth in order to make a list of those elements thatmust be united to produce it in America.II · The Democratic StateSOMETHING over eighty years ago eight diminutive states werehuddled together in that bootlike peninsula which is thrust into theMediterranean from the Alps to the African sea. Generally it wasreferred to as Italy. But actually there was no such nation. Then in1859, as the culmination of a great patriotic movement, inspired byMazzini, directed by Cavour, and precipitated by Garibaldi, theywere united in a single state called Italy. Half a dozen years laterthis movement was completed when Venetia joined and Rome wassubdued. Thus Italy as a state had an existence from its union to themarch on Rome of only sixty-two years. But in those sixty-twoyears and in the twenty which followed under Mussolini, it becamethe laboratory of the most dangerous and explosive collection ofprinciples in modern history.Out of this Italian laboratory came the thing we know as fascism.Its influence has spread throughout the continent of Europe andinto parts of this hemisphere. And the world today struggles in avast crisis which, in one sense at least, is the culmination of this fatalexperiment.The society which the apostles of the BJsorgimento fashionedtook the form that is now called a democracy. The history of Italy4