THE MARCH ON ROME 237
Later, on October i, four weeks before the march on Rome3
he explained his hostility to England and the League of
Nations.
£ During the four years that have followed the armistice
England has practised the most complete deception
possible on Europe and the world. It is from London
that the post-war doctrine of reconstruction has emerged.
. . . We have never for one moment been taken in by
that solemn league of tricksters which sits at Geneva
oblivious of the ridicule that surrounds it. Nor have we
ever believed in English pacifism or English reconstruc-
tionism, or any of the nebulous league theories which
are wafted over from the Anglo-Saxon world.1 We must
be ready for an essentially anti-English policy. It is not
in Italy's interest to support the British Empire ; it is in
her interest to contribute to its downfall.'2
There was a close theoretical and practical connection
between this view of foreign politics and Mussolini's fight
for power, both in cause and effect. Hatred of£ Wilsonism ',
of European reconstruction, of the c league spirit * abroad,
went hand in hand with hatred of socialism and democracy
at home ; the one was a function of the other, its counterpart
on a different scale : an easily grasped parallel.
6 The century of democracy is over,' wrote Mussolini
on August 19. c The ideals of democracy are exploded,
beginning with that of " progress ". Ours is an ec aristo-
cratic " century which followed the old democratic one.
The state of all will end by becoming the state of a few.
The new generations are not going to let the corpse of
democracy block their way into the future.'
He stressed this again on September 17 :
4 It is not our programme which divides us from
democracy, since all programmes are alike, but our
1 In Tsarist Russia the * nationalist populist' Prougavin foretold a fatal
conflict between bourgeois and parliamentary England and the Holy Russian
Empire, autocracy incarnate, supported by the will of hordes of mujiks. * The
historian,' remarks Tchernoff in his memoirs, From Nijni-Novgorod to Paris,
' cannot help remarking how in periods of reaction dictatorships, of whatever
kind, are fundamentally hostile to the English parliamentary regime.1
2 See below, on p. 257, the end of Mussolini's speech in Milan on October 4.