the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual
creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of
view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a
material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says
the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State
attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter's
concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is
always _in fieri_. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious
responsibility towards it.

But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness
and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the
citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the
population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.

Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an
entity preexisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be
recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling
class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation
and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the
State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could
not depend on the people--rather the people depended on the State and
on the State's authority as the source of the life which they lived
and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was,
therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses
through the power conferred upon it by its origins.

The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people's state, and, as such,
the democratic State _par excellence_. The relationship between State
and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is
accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far
as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the
formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses.
Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda
and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the
_Duce_ the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task
which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the
people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the
Party.

On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its
greatest social and constitutional reform--the foundation of the
Corporations o