Mussolini, like Lenin, has become! a cult. Just as radicals throughout the world regard Lenin as a superior being, an all-powerful individual to whose dictatorship they are willing to submit, so conservatives regard the erstwhile Communist Mussolini 8 the apogee of governmental genius, the potent force for the re-Storation of order out of chaos by dictatorship and might. In this biography of Mussolini, a form of hero-worship expresses itself which. is not unlike Mr. Linebarger's biographical pean to Dr. Sun sen. Nothing is wrong. Nothing gan be wrong. Even in infancy Mussolini was perfect. When any one differs with Mussolini, the other person is wrong. When any movement not "in accord Mussolini's ideas, the movement wrong. Even a poor women, whom the reviewer once met in Stockholm over a tea-cup, is pilloried because she and Mussolini did not agree after years of intimacy. That sor: of thing is not biography; it press-agenting, it is puffing, it is Mme. Sarfatti's book is interesting enough, particularly when it shows the evolution of Mussol from a radical Marxian socialist, to a conservative capitalistic undemocratic dictator. Mussolini changed his mind, as the writer puts it, when in 1915, it looked as though: the Germans were to march upon Paris. He then became a patriot, after having been a pa resigned from the "Avanti," perhaps the most radical socialist paper in western Europe, which he edited and whose extremist policy he hai formulated and dictated for years, He wrote, "I hereby resign irrevocably control of 'Avanti.' Free at! last. Greetings. Mussol Now there is nothing to prevent a man from changing his mind. Many intellectual changes were made during the heart-breaking days of the war. Many men had to cor promise between the ideals of their youth and the necessity of facing! the facts of the war situation. Bus Mussolini's subsequent conduct was not at all surprising, for he was radical in the execution of his! Patriotism. He would destroy all who disagreed with him. He would destroy the party of which he had been a member for so many years. Impulsive, uncontrolled in his sions, living rather by oratory than by reason, Mussolini the patriot was as extremist in his new cult as he had been in his old.
In 1919-20 Mussolini set out to counteract the Bolshevist movement in Italy. Who should have known Bolshevis and its methods better
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.