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tries and need not be in Italy. Indeed the architects of imperialismin Britain and France are immortalized in marble and bronze. Theeffect of the policy, however, upon their countries and upon thewhole world has been as evil as any misfortune that has come uponmen.It is interesting to find two recent arrivals from Italy confirmingthis view. Eleanor and Reynolds Packard, United Press correspondentsin Rome until the war, in their memoir Balcony Empire, makethe following comment on the present-day Italian:With all these years of training, both physical and mental, that the averageItalian had forced on him, it seemed strange that every Italian youth didnot develop into an ardent fascist. But the fact is that the so-called fascistideals ran counter to the Italian character. Fundamentally the Italian is nonmilitaristicby nature and he loathes all forms of regimentation. All theuniforms and fascist regalia with which Mussolini bedecked Italian bovscould never change this; so that as soon as fascist precepts were hard tofollow—that is when they involved hardships and sacrifices as in wartime—the average Italian instinctively turned against them. 2Mr. Herbert Matthews, of the New York Thnes, in a very recentbook affirms that years later, even after Italy's rigorous tutelage inmilitarism under Mussolini, she did not want the war and listenedwith pathetic credulity to the Duce's lying protestations of peace;that, indeed, in spite of the bloodthirsty tone of the press, thepeople loathed the war. 3It is, in fact, not in the alleged affinity of the Italian soul for thedevil that one sees with apprehension the true menace of thefascist disease. It is indeed in the very opposite of that fact thatwe discern its danger. It is in the fact that the devil could seducea people so little addicted -to the drug he offered that we mustderive our greatest concern. If this were something to which theItalian was peculiarly susceptible and against which our robustAmerican nature offered a stout resistance, then we would haveno need to trouble our heads about it. But as we observe the onsetof the fascist illness in Italy—and elsewhere—we will be more and'Balcony Empire, by Eleanor and Reynolds Packard, Oxford University Press, 1942.*Tbe Fruits of Fascism, by Herbert L. Matthews, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1943.*4