74	THE   RISE   OF   ITALIAN   FASCISM
8 intensify and complete their preparations for the forcible
overthrow of the bourgeois state and the inauguration of the
dictatorship of the proletariat5. c Complete their prepara-
tions ' : this was not easy, for how could they complete
what had never been begun ? Such preparations coulcl
only mean one thing : political action rallying to its pro-
gramme all whose sufferings, illusions, and need for justice
urged them towards a new order. The party leaders were
incapable of seeing the problem in such a light. Brave
words helped them to maintain their popularity with the
mob, but ended by befogging the minds, never very stable,
of those who used them. Mixed drinks intoxicate, but do not
give courage or decision, and generalizations about the
c inevitable and early crisis' of the administration, which it
was impossible for the bourgeoisie to escape, acted as narcotics.
For contact with reality they substituted a kind of frenzied
and harmless monomania which the bourgeoisie placed under
forcible restraint at the first opportunity. These extremist
cliches derived from a fundamental inertia, which they
helped to perpetuate. While the socialists awaited their
inheritance, now assured to them, at the bedside of the dying
man—the bourgeoisie—who was not worth putting out of
his agony, political life in Italy became one long meeting
at which the capital of the c coming 3 revolution was
squandered in orgies of words.
But the masses, still e awaiting' the revolution, took the
game seriously. The General Confederation of Labour,
whose reformist leaders had signed in Moscow in the summer
of 1920 a pact which was to bring about * the triumph of
the social revolution and the world-wide republic of the
Soviets*, had at the same time invited the Italian working
class to accept the new law of social insurance, based upon
contributions by state, employers, and insured. The workers
who had rejected summer time refused to pay their contri-
butions. What was the good of social insurance if there was
just going to be a revolution ? Why pay, since they would
soon be all powerful ? The gap between social insurance
and the world-wide republic of the Soviets was too wide.
The masses could not understand. Further, while the
Confederation led a campaign in favour of the law, the