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Fatefully in December 1934 the issue between Italy and Ethiopia was joined. Each shrieked to heaven that a collection of mud huts called Ualual, located variously on various maps, had been subjected to aggression by the other. Months afterward a League of Nations commission decided that for the Ualual Incident neither Italians nor Ethiopians nor anyone else was to blame (TIME, Dec. 24, 1934). By that time, though, the Man of the Year was fully in the making. He flashed off cables smoking hot with pathos, righteousness, defiance and more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger which made front pages throughout Christendom. It was sheer genius for Haile Selassie to deny that Italians used dumdum bullets instead of charging them with that military offense. It was again genius for him to cable out that in Ethiopia the local press had been ordered by the Emperor never to apply discourteous epithets to Benito Mussolini. Finally only genius could enable the Emperor to put himself—a frail, exquisite Semite who speaks French—on terms of friendly respect with robust Anglo-Saxon correspondents when they arrived in Addis Ababa and promptly nicknamed him "Little Charlie."
If the Covenant of the League of Nations be law, then in law Ethiopia and Haile Selassie are right and Italy and Benito Mussolini are wrong. The only trouble is that that portion of the white race represented by 44,000,000 Italians has opened hostilities and in the sphere of law Italy contends—much too late for popular acceptance—that under the League Covenant, membership in the League of Nations is barred to states in which slavery still nourishes, as it unquestionably does in Ethiopia. Therefore, argues Italy, the original mistake of admitting Ethiopia to the League should be corrected by ousting Ethiopia, after which Italy would have exactly as good a right there as Britain has in Egypt.
In successfully brushing aside these contentions of a Great Power; in dextrously pitching the issue of war on such grounds that the white race in general feels the future of the League of Nations to be at stake in the future of a Museum of Peoples in Africa; and in impressing even his own French doctor with his courage, his elevated moral stature and his peculiar genius for browbeating Ethiopians while he charms foreigners. Emperor Haile Selassie emerged in 1935 not only as Man of the Year but as the world's own inimitable "Little Charlie" for as many years to come as health sustains him.