That word, "reality," which Signor Mussolini was using so largely yesterday in his official journal, Popolo D'Italia, is one he might do well to look into. He uses it pretty often, but apparently without being aware of its definition. Apparently, indeed, he uses it under the impression that it means that he holds the whip hand in the world's grim game of making ready for war; apparently calls up before his eyes divisions of Italian Irridentia, led by himself grown to be forty feet tall, striding roughshod over the Western world and imposing its resistless will at the point of the bayonet; apparently, he sees it as meaning simply the destruction of London, Paris, Moscow, and New York under the fateful fall of Italian bombs.

And all that is so far removed from reality as to fall under the classification of paranoid delusions of grandeur. Reality in truth, embraces the fact that mighty air fleets are being fabricated in Britain and France and Moscow at a speed and at a cost that the Signor cannot hope to match. Reality embraces the fact that Britain and her daughter in culture, the United States--which the Signor went out of his way yesterday to line up with Britain as one of its appointed enemies--hold in their keeping the overwhelming preponderance of the world's sea power in the earth: such overwhelming sea power that no flotilla the Signor can bring into the Mediterranean is likely to stand before it for more than a few days. Reality embraces the fact that the same nations hold in their keeping the overwhelming great part of the world's resources, of the things that make the winning of wars possible. Reality embraces the fact that a bomb in the streets of London or New York means a bomb in the streets of Rome or Milan.

That, and more, is what reality actually embraces. And not all the brave brag will in anywise change it.