"Press On!"

With anxious, heavy hearts the 70 most potent newspaper editors in Italy crossed Rome's broad Piazza Colonna, last week, entered the gloomy, high ceilinged Palazzo Chigi, and waited in trepidation to be re- ceived by Il Capo.*

The editors feared that within a few minutes most of them might be out of jobs. They had heard rumors that Signor Mus- solini proposed to merge all Italian newspapers into a single, syndicated super-news organ, edited by the Dictator's brother, pudgy, tortoise-spectacled Arnaldo Mussolini, who carries on the Mussolini family newspaper Il Popolo d' Italia (The People of Italy) at Milan. As the tall clock in II Capo's antechamber ticked ominously, the nervous editors dropped their voices to whisper pitch.

So mouse-quiet grew the great room that all heard distinctly the click of the spring latch on Signor Mussolini's door as it was opened by his private secretary. Though the fellow smiled reassuringly, even obsequiously, many an editor had the feeling that he and his newspaper were being bowed into a trap if not onto a gallows. As they filed into the sanctum, each sheepishly saluted the lionesque Dictator, who stood at immobile salute behind his great carved desk.

Suddenly, surprisingly the heartbreaking tension snapped, as Il Capo smiled his peculiarly magnetic and friendly smile. With a few courteous sentences the host reassured his guests. He had called them in, he said, not to deprive them of their livelihood, but to dispel the false impression that the Italian press is not free, and to call upon them for industrious, intelligent support during the Italian electoral campaign of next Spring.

As usual, Signor Mussolini managed in his discourse to turn several familiar ideas inside out, disemboweling them with hearty, ogrish gust.

"The Italian press," cried II Capo, "is the freest in the whole world! . . . For instance, anyone of your papers may say that as a violin player I am a very mediocre amateur. . . .

"Italian journalism is free because it serves only the cause and the regime. . . . Elsewhere the press is at the orders of plutocratic groups and vested interests, such as public utilities and the steel industry; elsewhere the press is reduced to buying and selling sensational news, whose reiterated reading causes in the public a kind of stupefied saturation, with symptoms of debility, inanition and imbecility; elsewhere newspapers are grouped in the hands of a few individuals who consider journalism an industry, like iron or leather. . . .

"It is necessary that the Italian press be ... staffed with men . . . who above all are moved not by material objectives but inspired by idealistic motives. . . . It is true that the note of all Fascist writings is the same, but the note is struck not by my Government, but harmoniously by the Fascist journalists themselves. ... They do not await orders, day by day. They carry their orders in their consciences!"

Even enemies of Signor Mussolini will admit that the above is a smart defense of his much criticised technique of curbing the press. Even smarter and more cogent were his words as he launched into a critique of sensational journalistic methods:

"Some newspapers feel the need to inform their readers that 'A young Professor shoots his wife,' as though this was of interest to anyone except the professor's janitor and his immediate relations. Other papers dish up again for the thousandth time the mystery of the Archduke Rudolph at Mayerling,*; and others reprint to the point of nausea stories about the American colored dancer, Josephine Baker, the so-called 'Black Venus.' All this is harmful to the education of the masses. All this is worthy of the old regimes.

"Our editors must ignore these things and press on to the goals of Fascism! The stronger Fascism becomes the greater will be the inevitable reaction in the anti-Fascist world which will be angered by the necessity of acknowledging that once again it is Italy which has given a new order of the day in political and social advance."

--Signor Benito Mussolini's two principal titles are Il Capo del Governo, The Head of the State, and Il Duce del Fascismo, The Leader of the Fascist Party.

*His Royal Highness, only son of Emperor Franz Josef, was found reclining on a couch with his mistress, at the imperial hunting lodge of Mayerling --he with his brains blown out by a revolver; she, strangled. No satisfactory explanation of this state of affairs has ever been offered. Two years ago a romantic Austrian clerk, Ewald Laumann, visited the Archduke's mistress' grave, strewed thereon an armful of roses, then blew out his brains (TIME Sept. 13, 1926).