ITALY  S   INTERVENTION   IN   THE   WAR	/
For even Giolitti, the master of compromise, was to go.
On May 9, 1915, three hundred deputies to the Italian
Chamber—the majority—left their cards on Giolitti, who
tiad come to Rome, unaware that the die was cast, to defend
his parecchio proposal, which Sonnino had adopted a few
months earlier. The government, which had signed the
intervention agreement in the meantime and was only
continuing to negotiate with Vienna and Berlin the better
to guard its secret, encouraged demonstrations by c inter-
ventionists ', especially in Rome, Milan, and Bologna. In
Quarto d'Annunzio made a great speech in favour of war ;
in Rome nationalists and ' fascists5 mobilized and demon-
strated against parliament. Salandra resigned, but the
king assured him of his confidence, and the government
summoned the Chambers, but only to tell them what had
already been settled. War had come, and Giolitti was to
wait five years before returning to power.
So the Chamber., elected on a universal suffrage in 1913
when the swing to the left was considerable, and with a
majority in favour of neutrality, brought about intervention
and a dictatorship of the right. One cannot avoid a com-
parison with the post-war situation, when the 1921 Chamber,
democratic and anti-fascist, ended with the government of
Mussolini. From several standpoints the c glorious days'
of May 1915 were the counterpart of the march on Rome.
The overriding of the will of parliament by the king and a
handful of men, and the impression that the government
had been bluffed into giving way by a minority that had
been allowed to demonstrate, unchecked, in the streets,
made the people feel wronged and deceived, and led
directly to the anti-parliamentary and maximalist sentiments
of the post-war years. c The whirlwind of the war will blot
it out for the moment/ as Croce says in his History of Italy,
c but its consequences are irrevocable '. The carelessness,
the unconsciousness almost, with which the ruling class
plunged Italy into the war prepared the way for the dis-
appointments of peace which contributed so much to the
birth of fascism. And in the course of the struggle for
intervention the fasci of 1914-15 began to acquire the
mixture of demagogy, inflamed nationalism, anti-socialism