brutal attacks made by Fascists on their political opponents (mostly Socialists) were made by (inter alios} the Rome correspondent of the Daily Herald and by Professor Guglielmo Salvadori in the New Statesman. The former was deported from Italy and the latter beaten by armed Fascist hooligans in Florence, while the police looked on. Even The Times correspondent, who is no enemy to the Fascists, comments from time to time on the lawless violence still current in Italy, and eye witnesses continue to bring sad reports of the beatings and burnings which proceed. A terrible revenge has been taken by the Fascists on the workers who dared to vote heavily against them in the elections. In the province of Milan alone, 57 workers' buildings were burnt or sacked within two days. The Times, a paper by no means hostile to the forcible maintenance of capitalist order, was forced by the weight of the facts to write in its leading article on 5th May, 1924:—
"Numbers of disgraceful outrages were perpetrated by local Fascist! during the electoral period. Only a small part are reported, but the protest of the Vatican shows that many Roman Catholic associations of a charitable kind had their buildings wrecked under the eyes of the police. From Milan, where the Opposition parties are strong, there came reports of similar crimes in the city and for many miles around. The repeated destruction of copies of the great Milanese Liberal newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, notwithstanding the extreme mildness of its comments upon domestic politics, is a startling exposure of the pretence that opinion and the Press are free. They are nothing of the kind. Attempts, however moderate, to assert them are avenged by the local Fascisti, and hitherto—or, at least, until the other day—no real effort was made to repress or punish the offenders, or to protect their victims. It is stated with much probability that the real organisers of these crimes are well known to the authorities. The impunity they enjoy is a worse stain upon the Government and a far more ominous symptom of the situation than the impunity of the tools who do their bidding."
It is as a force directed against the interests and ideals of the workers that Fascism is receiving a special study here. But it is not sufficient to define Fascism merely as an anti-labour force, like the White Guards of Hungary or the army of Wrangel. Fascism has special characteristics which give it an international importance, even greater than that derived from its success in Italy. Fascism operates primarily in the interests of industrial capitalists. Often it opposes the land-owning elements in society, but allies itself with them in their common antagonism to the workers. Further, Fascism in Italy was built up not to ward off a working-class revolution, but as a result of the failure of the workers to seize and consolidate a revolution which was already half won. "Fascism," says Clara Zetkin, "… is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie in retaliation for proletarian aggression, but it is a punishment of the proletariat for failing to carry on the revolution begun in Russia."
The success of Fascism in Italy is due to two causes: the con-
