ITALY: No Miracles Today

“Up to today not even President Hoover has been able to work [economic] miracles,” said Prime Minister Benito Mussolini last week, “and he is the most powerful man in the world at the head of the richest country in the world.” Facing // Duce in a respectful crescent sat Italian Capital & Labor, not metaphorically but in solemn fact. This was the inaugural session of the new National Council of Corporations.* It was to hear the Prime Minister’s personal examination of Depression, his prophecy of when Prosperity will return.†

He whistled a much different tune from that of last Spring. In May and June, on his raceabout tour of Northern Italy, he hurled bombast from stumps and palace balconies, defied France, flayed other governments (especially Great Britain’s) for clumsy mishandling of unemployment. But now, in October, his sap having cooled, II Duce spoke at calm, significant length.

“Not All Can Be Saved!”: “In our usual blunt, precise Fascist style, without euphemism and without reticence, we admit,” said Il Duce, “that our general economic situation has grown worse since last October, when the American crisis burst with the violence of dynamite. . . .

“The Fascist Government is not passive in the face of the present difficult situation, as vile anti-Fascist scandalmongers say. The government has its hand on the pulse of the nation and hears distress signals from whatever source they come. But not all can be saved and some indeed deserve to go to the bottom. The majority of the latter belong to the category—enormously increased during and after the War—of business improvisers, men more reckless than enterprising, acrobats of industry and finance, men supremely encyclopedic in their initiatives.”

Pyramid Trusts Flayed. “The mountebanks of the economic world,” continued Signore Mussolini, looking several such on the Council benches directly in the eye, “complicate everything with innumerable companies on a chain system, with boards of directors composed of nonentities who exercise no true leadership, often with faked balance sheets and non-existent dividends. They are the true, authentic, most dangerous kind of antiFascists because they speculate on the good faith of the public. Prison is small retribution for their misdeeds. They sow such infinite ruin and misery and they do such harm that they truly deserve Death! . . .

“Some examples have already been made, but henceforward such men will be shown even more clearly that the public can not be defrauded and hard-earned savings cannot be misused with impunity.”

When Prosperity? Brightening as he approached prophecy, Il Duce ended gravely but optimistically thus:

“What I am about to tell you must not be interpreted in an absolute sense, but merely as my viewpoint after long and diligent study of the situation. If no unforeseen and irreparable events, such as war, occur—and Italy has done, is doing and will do everything possible to avoid war—if the phases of the economic phenomenon are not disturbed by extraneous elements, then we are already leaving the night behind us and are walking toward the dawn. In other words the crisis has now touched its culminating point with the new American crashes.

“Now the alternative is simple — either the end of all things or improvement. But since neither world economy nor humanity can die, improvement must occur. But let no one be too precipitate. The passage from the present state to one of compara tive prosperity is a cycle which will require at least three years.”

* Not oldfangled business corps., but new fangled substitutes for Italy’s former “work men’s unions” and “employers associations” disbanded as a result of Fascism. In legal structure the N. C. C. is a supreme Council of Capital & Labor under the of the State.

† For report of a similar speech last week by President Hoover to U. S. Capital, see p. 14.