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Beatitude & Pflichtgefühl. Continuing the most scholarly and minute analysis of the Dictator yet made, Dr. Finer reports: "He is certain of his star, certain that he cannot be assassinated until his work is accomplished, certain that Italy needs him, certain that his institutions are wholesome for Italy . . . certain that he cannot fail. . . . The impact of his personality on men, women and children far from the vicinity of Mussolini's physical presence is astounding. Far away, even to the uttermost confines of the kingdom, beyond the hills and fields and marshes separating them from Rome, even beyond the ocean, the charm works. A businesslike Party official, hearing that I was to visit the Duce, exclaimed enraptured 'Oh, thou in beatitude!'
'In . . . power of steady hard work, and the capacity to organize and direct a routine of government . . . Mussolini has made . . . an example to the rest of a nation which has not the steady energy of the English, nor the intense, if sometimes wasteful, energy of the American, nor the exacting Pflichtgefühl of the Germans. . . . [Mussolini's] extraordinary laborious life is founded upon the robust vitality and physique of a burly, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, rather short, well-knit athletic person.
"To all these characteristics," adds Scholar Finer, "Mussolini unites personal fascination. . . . His presence is exciting, disturbing, and, finally, commanding. People feel simply that they must obey. . . .
"Mussolini's personal fascination is accompanied by a sense of distance between him and his followers. . . . He is not a 'good fellow.' While he is not sullen, he is withdrawn. He is not a handshaker. Hence the impulse to substitute [for handshaking] the Roman salute. . . .All these gifts have won a crown for Mussolini; guarantee his omnipotence; render it as beneficial as a Dictatorship can be."
Even so, Dr. Finer is against Dictatorship, whether Fascist, Nazi or Communist, and democratic readers may close his tome prouder of Democracy and of themselves than ever.
Bullets in Their Tails. With II Duce, for better or worse, occupying his present crucial position on the fulcrum of European peace or war, the Mussolini family last week was proceeding steadily about business as usual.
Slightly cross-eyed youngest-son Romano Mussolini was at school, tricked out in the sissy Italian variant of an Eton collar (see cut). His little sister Anna Maria, the first child of the Dictator to bear "a good Catholic name," pursued her studies in the same class and both were cared for by fat, completely self-effacing Donna Rachele Mussolini who is her husband's idea of the perfect Italian wife. Above suspicion, she dwells most of the time in northern Italy, visited by her Caesar in a spirit of duty, which gives way at times to happy comradeship of an evening in the flickering glow of oil lamps on their farm.
Edda, the Dictator's favorite child, gave her chubby husband, young Count Galeazzo Ciano, to the war in its earliest phase and he dropped upon Aduwa from his battle plane the historic bombs which began the conflict. Also airmen at the front are the Dictator's two elder sons, Vittorio and Bruno, and last week, after dropping bombs, each received Ethiopian bullets in the tail of his plane for the first time.