As time went on, however, people came to acquiesce in the Fascist State. Some, indeed, felt genuine enthusiasm for Mussolini's efforts to make Italy strong.
The more perceptive realized that Fascism meant the strangling of independent thought and bided their time in jobs where they could evade active participation in the State and might even put in an occasional covert word for more libertarian methods: such was the attitude of a number of writers, journalists, and university professors.
Some industrialists and business men were genuinely disappointed when they found that Fascism was taking a very different turn from what they had envisaged when they first lent it their support: but they were the favoured of Fascism, which still needed them; and in the world economic crisis of the early nineteen-thirties they needed the State's practical aid.
For the ordinary citizen with a livelihood to earn and a family to keep, there was no possibility of survival outside the framework of the State; he might grumble at it's petty tyranny or feel cynical about the sycophantic cult surrounding it's Dictator, but if he dept quiet it need not disrurb him overmuch, and anyway he had no choice.
