Appetite

At a single sitting last week Signor Benito Mussolini was observed to devour:

A large pilau of rice, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.

A slice of cold boiled fish topped with mayonnaise.

A whole roast pigeon.

A salad.

A robust plate of strawberries.

Coffee.

In Rome the Dictator's personal physician recalled that Il Duce when performing the sedentary brain work of statecraft keeps to a scant, frugal, almost womanish diet. His sudden excess of appetite, his unwonted he-man meals, are the result of exercise, both muscular and vocal, on his recent whirlwind speechmaking swing around northern Italy (TIME, May 26, et seq.).

"I feel perfectly tranquil and safe among this mass of workers,"* mildly observed Il Duce, no longer ravenous and raving, last week to 150,000 workmen in a third and placid speech at Milan--the speech of a man who has dined and is content. ". . . It is unnecessary to recount what the Fascist Government has done for labor. We think of your interests, all your needs, because we love you as workers and fellow-Italians. Today's feast of labor shows how the regime respects labor and the workers."

Upon 18 aged toilers who had worked for the same firms 50 years, and upon two who had records of 60 years, Il Duce then pinned the Fascist decoration known as "The Star of Labor."

*As editor of the original Fascist paper Il Popolo d'ltalia in Milan, Signor Benito Mussolini was threatened constantly by the Socialist Chamber of Labor, kept a quantity of hand grenades about his office to cow "the enemy." An old employee, Margherita G. Sarfatti, writes in her authorized biography of Il Duce that "one day, the office boy, all unconscious of danger, was about to light the fire in the stove, just then full of bombs." She once reproved her editor gently thus: "Do you really think a bomb is quite a suitable thing to put a lighted cigaret on?''

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