I said then, “If the bourgeoisie think we are ready to act as lightning-conductors, they are mistaken.  We must go towards labour.  We wish to train the working classes to directive functions.  We wish to convince them that it is not easy to manage Industry or Trade:  we shall fight the technique and the spirit of the rearguard.  When the succession of the regime is open, we must not lack the fighting spirit.  We must rush and if the present regime be overcome, it is we who must fill its place.  The claim to succession belongs to us, because it was we who forced the country into War and we who led her to victory.  The present political representation cannot suffice:  we must have a direct representation of all interest.  Against this programme one might say it is a return to corporations.  But that does not matter.  Therefore I should like this assembly to accept the claims put in by national syndicalism from an economic standpoint....”

Is it not strange that the word corporations should have been uttered at the first meeting of Piazza San Sepolcro, when one considers that, in the course of the Revolution, it came to express one of the social and legislative creations at the very foundations of the regime?

2.  Development.

The years which preceded the March on Rome were years in which the necessity of action did not permit complete doctrinal investigations or elaborations.  The battle was raging in the towns and villages.  There were discussions, but what was more important and sacred—­there was death.  Men knew how to die.  The doctrine—­all complete and formed, with divisions into chapters, paragraphs, and accompanying elucubrations—­might be missing; but there was something more decided to replace it, there was faith.

Notwithstanding, whoever remembers with the aid of books and speeches, whoever could search through them and select, would find that the fundamental principles were laid down whilst the battle raged.  It was really in those years that the Fascist idea armed itself, became refined and proceeded towards organisation:  the problems of the individual and of the State, the problems of authority and of liberty, the political and social problems, especially national; the fight against the liberal, democratic, socialistic and popular doctrines, was carried out together with the “punitive expeditions.”

But as a “system” was lacking, our adversaries in bad faith, denied to Fascism any capacity to produce a doctrine, though that doctrine was growing tumultuously, at first under the aspect of violent and dogmatic negation, as happens to all newly-born ideas, and later under the positive aspect of construction which was successively realised, in the years 1926-27-28 through the laws and institutions of the regime.  Fascism today stands clearly defined not only as a regime, but also as a doctrine.  This word doctrine should be interpreted in the sense that Fascism, to-day, when passing criticism on itself and others, has its own point of view and its own point of reference, and therefore also its own orientation when facing those problems which beset the world in the spirit and in the matter.