THE GAPORETTO OF SOCIALISM 199
beyond the purely syndical sphere. In the same province of
Cremona the landowners had, in May 1921, got their own
representative, Giannino Ferrari, elected on the national
coalition list, and he had joined the agrarian group in the
Chamber. But, by the beginning of 1922, the Provincial
Federation of Employers5 Syndicates, formed under the
aegis of fascism, was dissatisfied with him, because, 'although
a direct representative of the landowners, he always, in this
very serious situation, adopted a passive attitude ', and in
the same resolution the Federation reminded ' the agrarian
associations throughout Italy that the name of Cremona
ought to be the signal for a great national movement to
prevent liberal governments, by their foolish and untimely
actions, from artificially reviving subversive organizations
which are at the point of death \ The landowners wanted
no state interference between themselves and the workers'
organizations, and no * legal5 obstacles put in the way of
the attack that they were determined to carry through to
the end.
So it was that the different elements to be found in fascism
in 1919-20, although they did not totally disappear, became
gradually absorbed in a more consistent movement, which
by 1921, and particularly by the first half of 1922, could
be defined as essentially { a bourgeois assault on reformist
socialism in municipalities, collective labour contracts,
employment offices and co-operatives, and particularly
against agrarian reformism—an assault led by the landed
proprietors of the Po valley, Tuscany and Apulia '.
For this reason Mussolini, though he had not committed
himself to any one policy to the exclusion of another, and
though he admitted that fascism had lost many sym-
pathizers,1 was pinning his hopes more and more on a
coalition government in which the socialists would have no
share. The socialists were entirely paralysed by internal
difficulties. At the time of the Bonomi crisis in February
1922 the party executive had in a lucid interval authorized
the parliamentary group to act as the situation demanded,
but it immediately took fright at its own daring and revoked
this order in March. On one side—the right wing of the
1 P. 194-