158 THE RISE OF ITALIAN FASCISM
by the Communist Party alone, without the socialists, in
fact against them. This was simply a piece of narrow-
minded and empty demagogy. Here and there a few shots
were fired by communists, and a few, despite the party ban,
joined the arditi del popolo, but the party as such practically
kept out of the fight, and by its tactics did much to help on
the victory of fascism.
There remained one course : to call in the state and
employ its vast resources against fascism ; but this was
barred by the Socialist Party's refusal to allow the parlia-
mentary group either to support or to join the government.
This party, which had rejected the constituent assembly,
because it wanted * Soviets everywhere *, could make no
political demands of the state which it proposed quite simply
to destroy. They could not ask this state to rid them of
their most dangerous enemies in order that they might carry
out their own march on Rome. The pact was thus
endangered by hundreds of incidents between workers and
fascists who were determined not to yield the positions they
had won, nor abandon the methods by which they had
won them. There was no c secular arm ' to enforce respect
for the principles laid down by the pact. Nor did anything
occur which might widen the breach in fascism, to make
the difference between the two tendencies an irreconcilable
one, or to compromise Mussolini and his friends and make
it impossible for them to relinquish their new policy. Left
to itself the fascist crisis could settle itself without much
difficulty.
Mussolini's problem was how to regain control of the
movement and make it a more manageable instrument to
serve his own personal policy and ambition. In February,
at the time of this Trieste speech, he had spoken against
turning fascism into a political party, and at the end of
May he had still been of this opinion.1 The revolt of the
squads and the important part they had played in opposing
his orders convinced him, however, that the movement must
be turned into a party so that it could be effectively dis-
ciplined. Although he abhorred programmes as c dogmas
and prejudices already out of date or easily left behind by
1 P. 143-