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On the final issue of whether Italy dare risk a showdown with the "collective responsibility" of League of Nations States, the Dictator rasped: "The sum total of our military forces on land and sea and in the air is such as to be able to respond to whatsoever menace, from whatsoever direction it may come."
"Second to None." With ''Flying Sam" in London, Premier Laval sped to Paris, and the League Assembly became in their august absence little more than a forum. Fidelity to the Covenant was pledged by Haiti whose black delegate declared: "The colored peoples of the world are watching. The period of colonial wars is closed." Into line fell Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Rumania, & Yugoslavia), Belgium, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Portugal, Panama, China, the Scandinavian & Baltic States, Poland and Soviet Russia whose roly-poly Foreign Commissar "Maxie" Litvinoff spoke in English and re-employed Sam Hoare's words to say that in supporting the League Russia will be "second to none." No nation offered to be first.
Comrade Litvinoff, always the stormiest petrel of Peace, succeeded in embroiling himself with stiff Col. Josef Beck, Polish Foreign Minister, in an exchange of diplomatic billingsgate over the German-Polish Treaty of Accord (TIME, Feb. 5, 1934). The Russian called this an arrow of anti-Communist aggression; the Pole sassed back that the Red was speaking with "obvious prejudice." When Litvinoff got up to sass in return, Col. Beck and his Polish aides left the League Assembly in a body "to smoke a cigaret outside."
This left the League Committee of Five still quietly preparing their recommendations, but the real scene of action had shifted to London. There French Ambassador Andre Charles Corbin daily pressed His Majesty's Government to commit themselves to a written pledge that their attitude toward German aggression would be the same as Sir Samuel said it would be toward Italian aggression. Ever since the World War it has been the unceasing aim of French diplomacy to get Britain to sign on that dotted line. If Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin could be made to sign, the European balance of power, profoundly disturbed when Britain countersigned Germany's rupture of the naval clauses of the Treaty of Versailles (TIME, June 24. et seq.). would abruptly be redressed on the basis of an Anglo-French entente and Dictator Mussolini would find himself on the hottest spot of his fiery career. As every Frenchman knows, Premier Laval only gave Mussolini a free hand in Ethiopia because London was flirting with Berlin.