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The great fascist evangelist did not fail to excite the admiration ofsome of those American foreign correspondents who are now proclaimingthemselves the most ardent lovers of democracy and flingingaround their venom upon men who were denouncing Mussolini'sfascist dominion when they were extolling it. Mr. Herbert Matthews,of the New York Times, in The Fruits of Fascism, tells us that he wasfor long "an enthusiastic admirer of fascism" and intimates that hewas converted only when he saw the fascist airmen raining bombson Spain in 1938. Eleanor and Reynolds Packard, United Press correspondents,in their book written after their expulsion from Italy,assure us that historians will divide Mussolini's dictatorship into twoparts and that the first, covering twelve years of his collaborationwith the democratic powers, was marked by a social program thatwas good, despite his oppressions, and that is being copied now bydemocratic countries. To Mr. Matthews there was a time whenMussolini was the "one man who seemed sane in a mad world." 11I recall these testimonials here merely because of their bearing onAmerican and British opinion upon what happened in Italy. Wecannot count on all good people in America rejecting fascist ideas.To many the pursuit of the hated Red justified the elements ofviolence in the episode. To others the imperious need of meetingthe challenge of labor justified the cudgels. Mussolini was all rightas long as he played along with the democratic powers. "I do notdeny," said Mr. Churchill as late as December 1940, in a speech inthe House, "that he is a very great man. But he became a criminalwhen he attacked England" Mussolini's crime lay not in all theoppressions he had committed upon his own people, not in histrampling down of liberty in Italy, in attacking Ethiopia or Spain,but in "attacking England." It is precisely in this tolerance ofordinarily decent people for the performances of such a man thatthe terrible menace of fascism lies for all peoples.n The Fruits of Fascism, by Herbert L. Matthews, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York,1943. Balcony Empire, by Eleanor and Reynolds Packard, Oxford University Press, 1942.73