THE GAPORETTO OF SOCIALISM 179
party together without making it inflexible. But he did
not want to tie himself down to anything, or leave the world
of adventure, where he felt at his best, for the tricky and
difficult one of fixed principles. He wanted to continue his
daily borrowing of ideas to meet all possible combinations
of forces opposing or supporting him. Ideas were only of
value in so far as they helped him on his way. And in. this
connection he took plenty of precautions ; before the
discussion was over he had thoroughly confused the issue by
a profession of exaggerated relativism.
* The fascist phenomenon/ he wrote after the Rome
Congress, c is the highest and most interesting manifesta-
tion of relativist philosophy. And since, as Wahiger
asserts, relativism is derived from Nietzsche and his Wille
zur Macht, Italian fascism has been and remains the most
formidable creation of an individual and national will to
power.3
This will to power embraced the entire fascist world, from
Mussolini, for whom life was just a * wild adventure ' and to
whom success was the only sanction, to the landowners and
manufacturers who, after shaking in their shoes for two
years, felt themselves once more the absolute masters of their
land and their factories, and thus saw c the relationship of
man's tyranny over man once more restored ' ; and from the
petit bourgeois, who only yesterday had felt himself crushed
between capitalism and the proletariat, and who now
considered himself the deciding factor between these two
forces, to the demobilized officer, who saw in the fascist
militia the possibility of another command and the daily
ration of power that he could not do without.
From one point of view the vagueness of the programme,
instead of hindering the growth of fascism,, helped it to
attract recruits and adapt itself to local conditions.
* The pretexts adopted by fascists to justify their offen-
sive are not important, since they vary from place to
place. At Bologna and Reggio Emilia one is told that
the cowardly socialists must be driven out since they
could not or would not begin the revolution. In Carrara