Speech at the University of Padua, June 1, 1923

By Benito Mussolini

Mr. Chancellor, Professors, My Young Friends!

It is not I who honour your University, it is your University which honours me, and I must confess that, although on account of my labourious dealings with men I am a little refractory to emotions, to-day, being among you, I feel deeply touched.

We have known each other for some time, from 1915, from the days of that May always radiant. I remember that the students of Padua hung up at the doors of this University a big paper puppet representing a politician about whom I do not wish to express any opinion now. But that act meant that the youth of the University of Padua did not want to hear about ignoble diplomatic bargains—did not want to sell its splendid spiritual birthright for a more or less wretched mess of pottage. The University of Padua, the students, who were not degenerate descendants of those Tuscan students who went out to die at Curtatone and Montanara, wished then to be the vanguard, to take up their post in the fighting line, carrying with them the reluctant ones, chastening the pusillanimous, overthrowing the Government and going out to fight, to sacrifice and death, but also to honor and glory.

From that time I know that among you there are faithful followers and that this University among all the others is truly an active centre of faith and of intense patriotism. If I look back for a moment to the rolling by of centuries, I recognize in this University a great fountain at which thousands of men of all countries, of all generations, of all races, have quenched their thirst.

The Government which I have the honor to represent repudiates, at any rate in the person of its chief, the doctrine of materialism and the doctrines which claim to explain the very complex history of humanity only from the material point of view, to explain an episode, not the whole of history, an incident, not a doctrine. Well, this Government prizes individual, spiritual and voluntary qualities, holds in high esteem the Universities, because they represent so many glorious strong points in the life of the people. In fact I do not hesitate to state that if Germany has been able to resist the powerful influence of Bolshevism, it is due, above all, to the strong University traditions of that people.

A people with an ardent spirit and with genius like ours is necessarily a well-balanced and harmonious one. The Government understands the enormous historic importance of Universities, has a respect for their noble traditions and wishes to raise them to the heights of modern exigencies. All this cannot be done at once, as everything cannot be accomplished in six months. All that we are doing at present is to clear the ground from all the debris which the rotten political caste has left us as a said inheritance. How could a Government composed of former soldiers ever disparage Universities? It would not only be absurd but criminal! From the Universities have come out by the thousands volunteers and by tens of thousands those magnificent warriors who used to assault the enemy's trenches with a superb contempt of death. They are our comrades whose memory we bear engraved in our hearts. You will write their names on your gates of bronze, but their memory will be more imperishably engraved in our spirit. We cannot forget them, as we cannot forget that out of the Universities came by thousands the "black shirts," those "black shirts" who, at a given moment, put an end to the inglorious vicissitudes of Italian politics, who took by the throat with strong fingers all the old profiteers who appeared, to the exuberant impatience of the new Italian generations, always the more inadequate for their paralyzing decrepitude. Well, so long as there are Universities in Italy—and there certainly will be for a long time—and so long as there are young men to attend these Universities and to become acquainted with the history of yesterday, thus preparing the history of to-morrow, so long as there are such young men, the doors of the past are definitely shut. I guarantee it formally!

But I add further that so long as these young men and these Universities exist, the Nation cannot perish and it cannot become a slave, because Universities smash fetters without forging new ones. If tomorrow it were again necessary, either for causes arising within or without the frontiers, to sound again the trumpet of war, I am sure that the Universities would again empty themselves to re-populate the trenches. (Loud applause.)

And now that you have rejuvenated me by twenty years, I would like to sing with you the "Gaudeamus Igitur." After all, Lorenzo de' Medici was right when he sang: "How beautiful is youth!" Well, my young friends, there can never be for us as individuals the certainty of the morrow, but there is the supreme and magnificent certainty of the morrow for us as a nation and as a people.

And with the students' hymn, let us utter in Latin a simpler word, Laboremus. To work with dignity, with probity and with cheerfulness, to assault life with earnest and to meet it as a mission, trying to fulfill the categorical injunction left us by our dead. They command us to obey and to serve, they command us discipline, sacrifice, and obedience.

We should really be the last of men if we failed to do our clear duty. But we shall not fail. I who hold the pulse of the nation and who carefully count its beats, I who sometimes shudder in the face of the heavy responsibilities which I have assumed, feel in me a hope, nay a vibration, of a supreme certainty which is this: that, by the will of the leaders, by the determination of the people, and by the I sacrifice of past, present and future generations, Imperial Italy, the Italy of our dreams, will be for us the reality of tomorrow. (Loud applause.)