326 THE RISE OF ITALIAN FASCISM
much deeper than any legal code. Useless, then, to say
c We were not there.' The masses, who have lost all, will
wrant to know why not.
The policy of the Italian communists and maximalists
was to let things get as bad as possible. A policy which
depends on aggravating a situation the better to control
and direct it is justifiable so long as one is ready and willing
to intervene at the right moment and restore order in the
chaos that follows. Such tactics, which must be employed
with the utmost precision, become too easily a game of
chance, depending as they do on the blindest and least
reversible offerees.1
The Italian maximalists and communists had no idea of
tactics : theirs was a state of mind that combined demagogy
with inactivity and was quite devoid of the prophetic passion
which calls down evil in order that virtue may triumph
more brilliantly, and of the creative spirit which is capable
of bringing about a vigorous transition from lowest to highest.
Such failings always imply a lack of humanity : the
syndicate, section, party or class remains hidebound by its
own limitations, and instead of regarding them as such,
ends by making a fetish of them and loses that power of
transcending them, which is the supreme necessity and spirit
of socialism. This was the sole cause of the hiatus between
the labour organizations, political and syndical, and the
mass of the people.
Many of the socialist leaders thought that the vague
popular movement which followed the armistice was just
a c war psychosis '. This was doubtless true, but it was not
the whole truth. Those who fought in the war came in
contact with the c system' and were swept up and con-
trolled by it for four years. The war had torn them abruptly
from their parish pump outlook and given them a stormy
1 The revolutionary defeatism of the bolsheviks in 1917 had an instantly
paralysing effect on the October revolution. For not only did Kerensky find
it impossible to carry through the offensive measures demanded by the Allies,
but Lenin too was unable to pass from defeatism to revolutionary war ;
hence Brest Litovsk. To-day it may be argued that this worked well, as the
central powers were forced to quit the Baltic countries and the Ukraine, and
Soviet Russia was saved in spite of all. But this resulted not from the military
paralysis of the revolution at the beginning of 1918, but in spite of it, and from
a combination of quite unexpected circumstances.