They can go as far back as 1919 and trace through his whole subsequent career as Dictator the same keynote of Empire-building he struck then: To Italians, who by this time know II Duce thoroughly, the hypothesis that he might be bluffing about Ethiopia has not to this day occurred. And a bluff is something that can be called. To the British Government the present shedding of Italian blood to secure space and raw materials for an overcrowded nation has looked like the Dictator's latest bluff. To frosty bankers it must eternally seem like bluffing when a fire-eating politician shouts at the top of his lungs, screams in headlines and has cut into a monument at Pesaro: "We will defend the lira to the last breath, to the last drop of blood!" Though the lira is a managed currency, II Duce has kept it on his technical gold standard through eight long years of rumors that he was bluffing and might be expected to devalue any day. After ignoring the bluffer until too late, it failed utterly to buy off Editor Mussolini by offering him the prize of a Ministry without portfolio.
The Italian Cabinet against which he launched his March on Rome was sure he was bluffing. All his life II Duce Mussolini has rattled and rattled before he struck. The most fateful fact about Benito Mussolini has always been, in crises, the conviction of his foes that he must be bluffing and therefore that his bluff can be called. This may be II Duce's unlucky 13th year, but with the hammer blows of 52 nations ringing out in an anvil chorus of sanctions last week, it was significant to the point of paradox that not Italy but Ethiopia was still being called "the underdog."ฤก935 Victorians. But in 13 swift years the once obscure Italian editor has carried his once negligible country up & up to the ultimate fulcrum on which Europe's future turns. Today other second-rate Powers still remain what they were then. 30, 1922 one Benito Mussolini, journalist, became Premier of one Italy.