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Next, popping into an airplane, Dictator Mussolini flew to Amseat on the Egyptian frontier. There, where a 200-mi. barbed-wire Egyptian boundary fence begins its southern sweep, he inaugurated the Balbo-built "Greatest Highway in Africa," 1,200 miles of macadamized strategic coastal road, over which Il Duce soon would drive back westward to Tripoli, the colonial capital. Before setting out he first inspected elaborate underground fortifications along the coast and flew from Tobruk to Derna, a name stirring to every historically-minded U. S. Marine.
U. S. President Thomas Jefferson 132 years ago decided to uphold the doctrine of "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" with reference to the Barbary Pirates, one of whose chief bases was Derna. These pirates made but a modest living out of Mediterranean shipping. The British & Continentals considered it cheaper to pay moderate tribute than to go to the expense of routing such reasonable pirates. Not so President Jefferson. While the importance of landing the U. S. Marines in 1805 at Derna should not be overemphasized, it was a bold stroke and gave Europe a foretaste of the kind of issue on which Americans will fight. Last week Benito Mussolini did not fail to stand at Derna in respectful, silent tribute at the monument of that onetime Connecticut schoolteacher who led the Marines in their glorious onslaught upon the barbarians of Barbary, a hero whose name many U. S. schoolchildren once knew, Captain William Eaton. Under his leader ship and the Stars & Stripes, the capture of Derna was made by 10 U. S. Marines, 38 Greeks and 400 Arab mercenaries.
In an instantaneous shift last week from Jeffersonian history to the Mohammedan present, Dictator Mussolini received the homage of an assemblage of tribesmen led by Mohammed Abd-el-Gheder who cried: "All peoples will declare that your visit to Libya has bound the East to the West and has united Islam and Italy! Allah, through you, is restoring peace and pros perity to mankind." Off in a motorcade of 60 cars whirled Mussolini & Balbo, the ten-day program including major Mohammedan homage at the Arch of Triumph* newly erected at the halfway point on the motor road, then opening of the annual Tripoli Sample Fair by Il Duce. a dash by air almost up to the French frontier, a performance of Oedipus Rex in the ancient Roman amphitheatre near Tunisia, and finally a second grand Italian day & night naval review with plenty of Fascist fireworks. Much as onetime Kaiser Wilhelm II used to angle for Islam's applause, Dictator Mussolini is making it a point to visit every important Mohammedan shrine, presenting handsome candelabra to each of Islam's more sacred mosques in Libya.
This week at Cyrene, while Benito Mussolini was reviewing a procession of Mohammedans who rumbled past in their peasant ox carts, cheers caused an ox to break over the traces, and bellowing it charged Il Duce. Italo Balbo and other Fascist bigwigs flung themselves upon the ox, twisting it over by the horns and holding it prostrate, sitting on its head until peasants ran up with ropes, hobbled the ox's feet. Scowling, the Dictator watched. Himself a peasant, he then scathingly reproved the peasant owner of the ox in choice Italian argot for being such a numbskull as not to know how to handle it.