things is impossible. Nor do the people really want to govern. When an election is imminent, are we not confronted everywhere with appeals to the people to exercise their suffrage rights?

IV

There stands Mussolini at the head of the manhood of Italy. What shall we do with him? Spiteful oratory may fret him, may distress him, but will not make him cease from governing. The one profitable thing we may do with Mussolini, profitable to us and to him, is to learn the facts about him and Italy. There may be in Mussolini some actual use for us. He has blazed a trail by which all nations may find their way out of the entanglements of democracy when the evils thereof become too great to be endured.

How did Mussolini extricate Italy from the sway of radicalism? He realized that in order to succeed in his venture of government he must unite the antiradical elements of the nation. The radicals were opposed, first of all to government, then to national aspirations and to private ownership. Hence his first act of government was a vigorous propaganda for government, for national greatness, and for private ownership.

The appeal for government and for fuller national life met with warm response from the young men returned from the war. Hard experience had taught many of these the perils of no government. They were for government of some sort, of any sort, and came to be known as Fascists. In others the war had strengthened and vivified the sense of national life. These were the Nationalists. Here the radicals had played into Mussolini's hand, for they had vented their militant pacifism upon these men, had subjected them to many annoyances.

Under the conditions of traditional democratic procedure the radicals formed an effective majority. To overcome this majority Mussolini adopted a different procedure. In the young Fascists and Nationalists who had served in the war he saw fit and willing material for a fighting force, by whose muscular superiority he might overcome the vocal superiority of the radical element. He organized a volunteer force avowedly for the purpose of executing a revolution against radicalism and establishing government by extraconstitutional methods. The army might be relied upon for neutrality, but for no more. The officers were in sympathy with his nationalistic ideals, but the men had been affected by radical propaganda.

A talent indispensable to the leader of a revolution is the talent of keeping discipline. Be his aim ever so lofty, his vision ever so clear, he is doomed to failure if he cannot keep his followers in line. This talent Mussolini possesses in a high degree. The discipline within the Fascist Party is as strict as any military discipline. To maintain such discipline without the support of law and custom, even for a day, in these democratizing times is no mean achieve

ment.

As a result of his stand for private ownership Mussolini received the funds needed for the revolution through the established and accustomed channels, and thereby avoided the friction that would have resulted from compulsory levies on wealth.

Mussolini is not a hidebound doctrinaire; he is a man of practical judgment, who must work freely with an eye single to immediate beneficent results and let policy unfold from day to day. He realizes that constitutions are made for government, not government for constitutions. He does not aim to revise the constitution first,

and then govern under such revised constitution. Rather his aim is to give the people in each phase of public business such government as seems practicable under the existing conditions. Only gradually, as he gathers support from the accumulating benefits of government, will he press toward a more efficient constitution. He seems not to contemplate any curtailment of the universal franchise, recognizing the fact that political stability requires that the power to rebuke and even to dismiss sham government be left in the hands of the people. He merely exerts a moderate but steady pressure toward a franchise so proportioned that the governing initiative of the more responsible, more intelligent, more creative element in society may find in it a channel of facile expression. To this end he is increasing the weight of the vote of those who have rendered some tangible service to the State.

It is a momentous thing, this Fascism in Italy! It means that Italy, long hagridden, vexed with foul enchantments, is not to die, but to live. We see Italy rise like a young giant, see her shake all that magical trumpery to right and left, trampling it stormfully under foot, and declaring that there still is life in her, not for recovery only, but for new and better things. Italy has put her feet upon reality. There only lie strength and healing for her and for us. Fascism was not a decorous process, as democratic oratory esteems decorum; but the alternative to it was death.

The basic problem of government, then, is not to secure, for the time being, order and prosperity. The basic problem is deeper than that it is to instill into the people a faith in which these exterior goods may find their permanent soil, a faith that shall make them for all time the competent guardians of their inalienable right to be well governed. First of all the people must be aroused to a deep and vivid sense of their power and of their dignity. They must know that they possess a strength which no political group can resist. They must know that their will, if they choose to exercise it, is absolute, and their judgment final. They must be charged with the responsibility of maintaining an unfaltering sense of sturdy, self-reliant manliness. But, oppression by their mock superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: that of finding government by their real superiors. For this there are required also reverence and obedience. A people ever set against government will be as ill governed as a people too indolent or too cowardly to throw off sham government. In most vital need, and with a passionate instinctive desire for guidance, the masses should ever have an eye to their true governors. It is not well with a people if it will not acknowledge such men when they appear; a people is in a chaotic state until it will acknowledge such men. Without such governors no fibre of the past took form; without such no State is secure, nor any civilization stable.

I HAD A LAWN MOWER READING the other day, in a book about the menace of machinery, that 'industrial civilization, having created for unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever before,' I was pleasantly surprised to find this light on our industrial civilization illuminating and explaining also a suburban mystery the tacit conspiracy of men who mow their own lawns to lure others into the same employment. There is little propaganda, no concerted and conscious effort, no formal organization; but rather a single impulse common to all men who operate their own lawn mowers, and making them, so to speak, all push together in the same direction. Each advances the common purpose by his assumption of innocent enjoyment, for any one of them is a moving picture and living advertisement of the pleasure that a lawn owner derives from taking care of the lawn himself.

I remember, as it were but yesterday, my first lawn. A lawn mower came with it, left behind by the previous tenant. I had often watched men mowing their own lawns, and, even if there were nothing else to be said for it, mowing the lawn myself would be an easy way to save money. But health, as well as pocketbook, would be benefited by this pleasant exercise. With my lawn mower - and this was truer than I then suspected - there would always be something to do in the open air before supper. It was rather a large lawn - but so much the more

exercise, so much the more benefit to my health, so much the more appetite for my supper. Without criticizing the advantages of wealth, it had often struck me, looking over the fence, that the men who mowed their own lawns had much the better of it compared with those who hired professionals. Pushing, they seemed to make a fair world safer for democracy; and their wives, affectionately watching them from the screened porches, seemed to make divorce an idle invention of a sensational press. Although I did not then know it, hardly anything gives a wife more satisfaction than watching a tired husband pushing a lawn mower. Often, indeed, when he thinks he is done for the day, and is wearily dragging the lawn mower back to its resting place, she will come out from the screened porch and show him all the spots he has unwittingly missed. Then, if any stranger is watching him, he will prance back with his lawn

mower.

A lawnless man may observe, say, twenty gentlemen mowing their own lawns and they all look very much alike, their twenty lawn mowers smoothly cutting the grass, and their twenty wives smoothly watching them from their twenty screened porches. What no lawnless man may know, for not one of these twenty gentlemen will ever tell him, is that they are doing something that they have come to regard as work. For one reason or another - thrift, unsuspected poverty, innate perversity, labor troubles with professional pushers, a quixotic desire to please the wife, or this reason or that each has become the motive power

of a

machine for grass-cutting. Yet I do not mean that these gentlemen are acutely unhappy. Things might be worse. Think of those poor wretches who used to row in the galleys, and the brute of an overseer who walked back and forth and kept them at it with a long whip! There is nothing like that on the screened porch; and, after all, a man who is mowing his own lawn ought to be grateful to a wife who shows him where he has skipped a blade or two. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well. But they are not so happy as they pretend to be, nor anything like so happy as they look from the other side of the fence. They know now, in fact, that a lawn mower is one of those mechanical drudges, created by an industrial civilization, that enslave the operator and enforce a contribution of toil more intense, exacting, and irksome than ever before; and these slaves

having, as it were, caught and sold themselves to their master- instinctively desire to minimize and conceal their servitude and enlarge their company. An informal Fellowship of the Lawn is established, whose seal, if it had one, would bear a lawn mower rampant and the bravely satirical motto, 'Apud novercam quærere,' or if the reader has forgotten his Plautus

"Complain to your stepmother.' To distinguish himself from these slaves, as a free man following a respectable calling of his own volition, any man who mows a lawn for hire dons a derby hat two sizes too large for him. It is an odd sort of uniform, but unmistakable at a distance.

Yet it is not really the lawn mower that makes the trouble. These gentlemen would be just as unhappy with scythes and sickles, though they would get better exercise. It is the lawn itself -those innumerable blades of grass whose incessant growth the professional in his derby hat naturally regards as a

beneficent provision of nature, and the gentleman who mows his own as one more infernal example of the futility of human effort. Never at rest, never in a hurry, and no sooner cut down in one place than they have grown up in another. A man who mows his own lawn must not think too much about that: it grows while he mows and he mows while it grows, and it grows while he mows and he mows while it grows, and it mows while he grows and he grows while it mows. An imaginative man who mows his own lawn must watch himself lest he fall into a dangerous habit of watching his lawn - looking at it just before he goes to bed, and again the first thing in the morning; wondering about it in the office, and hurrying home by an early train to look at it in the afternoon. When I mowed my own lawn I used sometimes to go back and take a look at it after I had put up the lawn mower. One should take it lightly.

Sing ho, ye merry blades of grass

Whose numbers none may know!
The mowers come, the mowers pass,
And still the grass blades grow.

Sing ho, ye merry gentleman Who pushes o'er the plain! He oils his mower from a can, And pushes on again.

Sing ho, ye merry summer sun That warms the world below! It shines alike on everyone

Who has a lawn to mow.

Sing ho, ye merry summer day
When early is the dawn!
So let us sing a merry lay

A-mowing of the lawn.

One does not think of these things in the beginning. The first week that I mowed my own lawn I wrote an essay on the subject. 'Although such persons,' said I, 'no doubt exist, I have never met a man who did not in some degree enjoy operating a lawn mower.

The moving guillotine of dandelions and buttercups advances gayly over the lawn, tossing in the air a pleasing cascade of cut grass and dandelion and buttercup heads. The mower follows along the smooth green carpet of his own laying, like the bridegroom of an invisible bride on his way to the altar.' 'Compared with tennis, golf, croquet, archery, or other outdoor sports,' I said also, 'mowing the lawn is easy to master to such a degree of competence as gives a man comfortable self-respect in the company of other followers of the same pastime.' 'Although mowing the lawn,' I said further, 'has hitherto been accepted as an exclusive and oneman occupation, there is no good reason why it should not be followed in company, as companionable a pleasure for intellectual men as golf.' I described the joy of a man mowing his lawn in the early morning when 'a bird pipes in the tree, another twitters in the bushes as he lifts the lawn mower out of the shed and sets it in the unmarked path that it will presently follow.' It was an appreciative essay, and, as one reader bitterly remarked to the editor, anybody who could write it deserved to spend eternity mowing the palace grounds of Lucifer.

For this mood does not last, and the operation of a lawn mower, as time goes on, is even productive of odd and disturbing hallucinations. The machine seems to vary in weight, though never lighter than it ought to be; and the lawn itself, level to the eye, seems at times to have a perceptible upgrade in every direction. Inanimate objects take on an uncanny semblance of life, stealthily retreating as the lawn mower is pushed toward them, and as stealthily following when the lawn mower is turned about and pushed in the opposite direction. Twigs and pebbles gather from all over the place and struggle with each other to get into the

SALVAGING SOCIABILITY

COUSINS from the hinterland frequently aver that New Yorkers are unsociable. Back in Canopee, they say, all the amenities are observed by those who live side by side. But, New Yorkers may well reply, here we do not live side by side. We live end to end; and the only means of informal, neighborly exchanges are, for many, such as are afforded by the dumb-waiter and the air shaft.

I once knew of an apartment house where, of an evening, a soulful tenant could carol a melody in the vicinity of his air shaft, certain that others above and below him would relay the refrain up and down the same channel of neighborliness. But this harmonious living was foredoomed. Less musical tenants objected and inferred that