To Milan last week, with Achilles ("Pantherman") Starace, No. 2 Fascist and Party Secretary, in his retinue, sped Head-of-the-State Benito Mussolini to build up the morale of that industrial region where bitter unemployment persists. En route Il Duce cajoled Italian peasants at their harvesting, speaking from a truck, a threshing machine, a motorcar, a platform built like the prow of a ship, and from a Hitler-taunting replica of the ox-drawn battle carts with which the Lombard League in the 12th Century repulsed Teutonic Frederick Barbarossa.
In Milan, where 4,000 extra police had jailed all dissidents who might shoot at Il Duce, he had the sun-lit top of a 30-ft. tribune in Cathedral Square all to himself. He had hoped that the Milanese would march into the vast, empty square in nice-&-tidy Hitlerish ranks and provide a scene of disciplined might for the newsreels. The Milanese did better. They jammed into the square, clambered onto every pedestal, statue and ledge in the vicinity. The burly Duce, squinting against the refulgent sun, was obliged to wave his arms to get his flock to keep quiet and hear him roar through loudspeakers, which worked imperfectly, a promise to Laborers.
Roared he: "The economy which concerned itself only with private gain is being replaced by an economy which has as its principal object the safeguarding of the interests of collectivity. . . . The workers must enter ever more intimately into the productive processes, participating in its necessary discipline. ... If the last Century was the century of the power of capitalism, the present Century is the century of the power and glory of labor." (Applause, applause, applause.)
"For this," he went on, "we must be left in peace."
Mention of peace gave him opportunity to tell his attitude toward Italy's neighbors:
"There is no great possibility of improving Italy's relations with Jugoslavia as long as journalistic polemics continue which wound us to the innermost core of our being. Nobody shall place in doubt the bravery of the Italian army. . . ."
He then promised that the much awaited financial & political agreement with France would be signed by Nov. 1. But at that very moment the Jugoslavian King was sailing toward Paris.
As the august party sped from Milan to Cremona, Pantherman Starace told young men who prayed for jobs: ''Remember that Fascism promises you neither honors nor jobs nor profits, but only duty and combat."