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None of His Majesty's subjects in the United Kingdom saw last week any such thing as a news map (see cut) of the actual Mediterranean situation: roughly one million tons of fighting craft jammed into the small sea which Romans have called for over 2,000 years Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea"). On paper the Mediterranean seemed "bottled up'' by British ships at its two outlets, Gibraltar and Suez. But the paws of the British Lion remained relaxed last week. Italy's transatlantic liners continued to shuttle on schedule through the Straits of Gibraltar. Italian transports moved methodically through the Suez Canal, carrying an average of 2,000 Italian troops per day to face Ethiopia, 1,000 miles south.
League Trap? Squire Baldwin's diplomats at the Foreign Office and on Britain's delegation at Geneva repeated daily last week that His Majesty's Government were not acting "against" Italy but "for" the League covenant. They firmly deprecated all suggestions that Britain was bent on curbing Italy to protect her own imperial interests in Africa. "No selfish or imperialist motives enter into our minds," they all said, recalling the similar declaration at Geneva of new British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel John Gurney Hoare (TIME. Sept. 23).
"Flying Sam" had been silenced in London last week by arthritis but his predecessor as Foreign Secretary, courtly Sir John Allsebrook Simon, now Home Secretary, took up the Empire theme. To a gathering of sturdy Britons at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire, Sir John cried: "Our moral authority is extremely high."
Thus doubly bullied by the world's most powerful fleet and most plausible statesmen, Big Bully Benito Mussolini raged in Rome: "We find it monstrous that the nation which dominates the world refuses us a small bit of land under the African sun! Many times I have given Britain assurance that her interests in Ethiopia would be scrupulously respected. Her attitude, I repeat, is monstrous! The real reasons why Britain so strongly opposes Italy she does not mention."
This drew a final British retort from the most potent statesman in Prime Minister Baldwin's Cabinet, lean, hook-nosed Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, frequently mentioned as a future Prime Minister. Speaking at Floors Castle in Scotland, Mr. Chamberlain asked for an even larger British Navy. "The dangerously low level to which our defenses have fallen has caused some to treat us contemptuously," said he. "This is not a tolerable situation. . . . Italian opinion has been led to regard Britain as a monster of hypocrisy and selfishness. This is not true."