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Not a member of the Fascist Party and burning with no fanatical flame, Professor Guarneri, who reports three times a week to II Duce, closed with the calm estimate that even assuming successful military operations, which every Italian hopes will be swift and glorious, the development of Ethiopia would in any case require "fifty years of sacrifice before reaping the commensurate reward." Perfectly aware of this, Dictator Mussolini last week loosed the frenzy required to build empires, with sirens, church bells, battle planes thundering over every Italian city of importance and a nationwide hookup of loudspeakers in public squares which enabled 20,000,000 Italians to hear him in the open, women & children harkening on the fringes of massed male blackshirts or turning on the radio at home.
Shrieked loudspeakers warming up the populace, "The entire country is now marching toward the loudspeakers! Italians are waiting for the voice that will enflame their souls!"
For over three hours Fascists, jammed outside the Dictator's Palace and down every street as far as the eye could see, kept shouting his name varied with such cries as "With Thee, Duce! always and everywhere!" and, "What do the English do? The English make us sick!"
Finally lean, pantherlike Fascist Party Secretary Achille Starace snarled into a microphone that the Dictator was ready, the great glass doors of his lofty balcony snapped open, and out stepped Honorary Corporal Benito Mussolini of the Fascist Militia in that uniform, alone except for two soldiers who flanked him with rifles at present arms. "Blackshirts of the Revolution!" roared II Duce, "men and women of all Italy! Italians all over the world-beyond the mountains, beyond the seas! Listen! . . .
"Forty-four million Italians are marching in unity behind our Army because the blackest injustice is being attempted against them-that of taking from them their place in the sun! ... It is against this Italian people to which mankind owes its greatest conquests-this people of heroes, of poets, of saints, of navigators, of COLONIZERS-that the world dares to threaten 'sanctions.' . . . Italy! Italy! entirely and universally Fascist, rise to your feet! Let the cry of your determination rise to the skies and reach our soldiers in East Africa. It is the cry of Justice and of Victory!" Secreted in the Dictator's frenzy-rousing speech was a pledge of peculiar interest to Geneva statesmen who, while feeling that the League must save its face by voting "sanctions," desperately hope these will not provoke II Duce to war in Europe. The Dictator pledged, "To economic sanctions we shall answer with our discipline, our spirit of sacrifice, our obedience." This of course was topped with the characteristic Mussolini smash, "to military sanctions we shall answer with Militarism! To acts of war we shall answer with WAR."