ITALY: Council for Chamber

With a sweeping order of the day worthy of that other little man Napoleon Bonaparte, short, broad-browed, flashing-eyed Benito Mussolini canceled last week the Chamber of Deputies’ power to legislate in the economic affairs of Italy and conferred this power on the National Council of Corporations, the great coordinating body of his Corporative State (TIME, Nov. 20).

“The Chamber of Deputies has never pleased me!” II Duce exuberantly told the Council which pleases him at the moment very much. “When the Fascist regime was created we buried political liberalism.* Today we bury economic liberalism!”

The new kind of State which II Duce is creating will replace economic liberty (i. e. capitalistic laissez faire) by regulation of every phase of Italian production, agricultural as well as industrial, under the National Council of Corporations. Orating to this Council the Premier opened his mind on an amazingly wide range of subjects.

“The League of Nations,” he abruptly observed, “has become an absurdity” since the resignation of Japan and Germany. In European affairs, he hinted, the next important directives will be given not by the league of 57 states but by Britain, France, Germany and Italy which signed in Rome last July II Duce’s Four-Power Pact. “At present there is a great silence about the Four-Power Pact,” he went on. “Nobody talks about it but everybody is thinking about it!” Thereat the Council broke into applause.

Nearly half his speech II Duce devoted to flaying unregulated, laissez faire Capitalism which he said had been decadent since 1914, plunging toward ruin in an orgy of overproduction and inhuman standardization.

“Our State is not an absolute or absolutist State!” he cried. “Our State is organized, human, attached to the realities of life” through the representation of Italian employes and employers in the National Council of Corporations. “The decay of (laissez faire) Capitalism coincides with the decay of Socialism. The Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.”

The Council rose amid cheers for II Duce’s kind of Capitalism. Next day he appointed his 21-year-old nephew, Vito Mussolini, to be editor and general manager of the Mussolini family newspaper II Popolo d’Italia of Milan, founded by Uncle Benito and edited after he became Premier by his late brother Arnaldo, Vito’s father. Last week the first striking editorial to appear under Editor Vito’s regime was also all about Capitalism—about the recognition by what II Popolo called the “ultra-Capitalistic” Roosevelt Administration of the Soviet Union (see p. 10). “The barriers raised by the traditional orthodoxy of the Republic of the Stars and Stripes,” editorialized Vito Mussolini, “have crashed under the weight of realities. … Is this a prolog to a new international morality? . . . The Republic of the Stars and Stripes … is the supreme conciliator of extreme contradictions, such as puritanism and Hollywood or such as the thrift of the farmers of the West and the audacities of Wall Street.”

As his final audacity of the week, II Duce started rumors that he plans to withdraw Italy from the League of Nations by ordering the Grand Council of the Fascist Party to meet Dec. 5 “to make an important decision on Italy’s relations with the League.”

Italian withdrawal, chorused Italian editors, would sound the death knell of the League and greatly enhance the importance of II Duce’s Four-Power Pact.

*As he put it in his early days as Premier: “Fascismo has already stepped, and, if need be, will quietly turn around to step once more over the more or less putrid body of the Goddess Liberty!” (TIME, Jan. 31, 1927).