(See front cover)
On Oct. 30, 1922 one Benito Mussolini, journalist, became Premier of one Italy.
Today other second-rate Powers still remain what they were then. But in 13 swift years the once obscure Italian editor has carried his once negligible country up & up to the ultimate fulcrum on which Europe's future turns. This may be II Duce's unlucky 13th year, but with the hammer blows of 52 nations ringing out in an anvil chorus of sanctions last week, it was significant to the point of paradox that not Italy but Ethiopia was still being called "the underdog."
1935 Victorians. The most fateful fact about Benito Mussolini has always been, in crises, the conviction of his foes that he must be bluffing and therefore that his bluff can be called. All his life II Duce Mussolini has rattled and rattled before he struck. The Italian Cabinet against which he launched his March on Rome was sure he was bluffing. After ignoring the bluffer until too late, it failed utterly to buy off Editor Mussolini by offering him the prize of a Ministry without portfolio.
Though the lira is a managed currency, II Duce has kept it on his technical gold standard through eight long years of rumors that he was bluffing and might be expected to devalue any day. To frosty bankers it must eternally seem like bluffing when a fire-eating politician shouts at the top of his lungs, screams in headlines and has cut into a monument at Pesaro: "We will defend the lira to the last breath, to the last drop of blood!"
To the British Government the present shedding of Italian blood to secure space and raw materials for an overcrowded nation has looked like the Dictator's latest bluff. And a bluff is something that can be called. To Italians, who by this time know II Duce thoroughly, the hypothesis that he might be bluffing about Ethiopia has not to this day occurred. They can go as far back as 1919 and trace through his whole subsequent career as Dictator the same keynote of Empire-building he struck then:
Imperialism is the eternal and immutable law of life. It is, at bottom, nothing other than the need, the desire and the will to expansion which every individual, and every live and vital people, possesses.
In essence, this was the keynote of Britain's Victoria more than half a century ago. The great Queen, with her pride in British valor and her joy that backward peoples should have the benefit of British rule, has a superficially different but basically similar counterpart in the Dictator of 1935, with his rousing trumps to Fascist valor and his real conviction that Ethiopians are savages who can properly be brought under Italian rule.*
Mistakes & Sins. In Rome last week, aside from the cares of war (see p. 14), the Dictator busied himself daily grappling with the awful risks he runs by steering a Victorian course in 1935. At his very elbow last week was the League of Nations in the person of grey-haired, ruddy-cheeked Sir Eric Drummond. As Secretary General of the League from its founding until he resigned amid widespread regret two years ago, this British Ambassador to Rome is ripe with "The Spirit of Geneva," "The Spirit of Locarno" et al.