THE HYSTERICAL BOURGEOIS

Those jubilant Americanists who a few months ago were noisily celebrating the triumph of Italian Fascism are strangely silent. The determined rejection of Muscovite nostrums by the ex-soldiery of Italy was followed by a similar movement in Germany, and hasty prognosticators saw the Ku Klux Klan as a symbol of an American stand against foreigners and foreign doctrines. It has been impossible to discover the person who applied the tack to the over-inflated balloon of bourgeois self-righteousness, but it evidently has been applied: perhaps the sturdy citizen himself was not among the last to grasp the ridiculous exaggeration of his pose as the single-minded defeader of national ideals.

At all events, the Ku Klux of America seems to have taken flight with all its clattering symbols of Kleagles and Klaverns. The suggestion that it was a clever hoax, highly remunerative to its perpetrators, has dissolved this shadowiest of empires. In Germany the menacing standards of nationalism and anti-Semitism have been buried under a blizzard of hostile ballots. Even in Italy, a home of unreflective national passions, the Fascists are relaxing their grip.

Although the opposition press appears, if at all, with innocuous comments, although parades and meetings of Communists are resolutely forbidden, although Mussolini uses all his faculties in geeing and hawing a turbulent assembly along the path of Fascism, it is evident that the mailed fist has strained its sinews. His hold on the Italian imagination is gone. It may be weeks or months before Mussolini disappears, but the romantic light of the dawn of Fascism has already vanished under the cruel glare of a full day of oppression, and it seems that the Italian people but awaits the time and occasion to dissolve this political monster under the destroying acid of its anger.