A British loan to help Italy develop Ethiopia has never ceased to be "in the cards." It was predicted in London banking circles even while Anthony Eden was at his most fervent in Geneva, hurling the thunderbolts of Sanctions at defiant Benito Mussolini (TIME, Oct. 21, 1935 et seq). Last week this British loan was just around the corner, according to the most orthodox of London and Rome correspondents. In
Rome Sir Eric Drummond, the British Ambassador who attempted to dissuade His Majesty's Government from springing the booby trap of Sanctions, and explained over the long-distance telephone time after time that Benito Mussolini is no booby, last week had the satisfaction of signing with II Duce's son-in-law, Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, a general Anglo-Italian pact of conciliation, appeasement and concord. Having affixed their signatures, the Briton and the Italian clasped and shook hands with particular vigor and warmth. The Eagle of Fascism had made peace with the British Lion.
Particulars of the pact were of minimum importance compared to the maximum import of its having been signed at all. In British and Italian quarters its phrasing was called "deliberately loose," the object of this being to permit the British Cabinet to keep the boiling antiFascism of Laborites in the House of Commons from unduly effervescing. Even so the London Daily Worker came out with a cartoon in which an extremely virile Benito Mussolini peers out over a Roman balcony toward a lawn on which an extremely effeminate Anthony Eden dances toward him in diaphanous costume, finger crooked coyly in mouth.
Behind the Dictator is the prostrate figure of Ethiopia, and behind Mr. Eden peer coyly from bushes Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, also in diaphanous costume and with cupid wings. Cries delighted II Duce in the Daily Worker's caption: "There are fairies at the bottom of my garden!"
In highest official quarters the pact of Eagle & Lion was said to have been supplemented by a verbal "gentlemen's understanding," not strictly binding, but to the effect that London and Rome anticipate: 1) cessation by the extremely powerful Italian radio station at Bari of its anti-British broadcasts in the languages of the Near East; 2) disintegration of the British ''Mediterranean accords" with France, Yugoslavia. Turkey and Greece, made at the time of Sanctions and considered by II Duce as menacing Italy; 3) easy going by Italy from now on in the Spanish Civil War, and even easier going as to the Balearic Islands, which Britain has feared Italy might seize any day; 4) virtual abandonment by Britain of her refortification efforts in such Mediterranean bases as Malta, which Italy commands from the air today.