(2 of 6)
As they faced each other across the great oak table in Palazzo Venezia last week neither Sir Eric nor the Dictator harbored illusion. The sins and the mistakes of Italy's Victorianism were transparent.
Mistake No. 1: In 1923 when Mussolini had been Premier but a few months, Italy joined France in sponsoring Ethiopia for membership in the League. This piece of flattery to a savage Empire was the opening move in long years of attempted peaceful, economic penetration of Ethiopia. Felicity touched its high when the present Emperor Haile Selassie visited King Vittorio Emanuele III in Rome and was showered with lavish gifts, including some small dogs which still yap at Addis Ababa. Forgotten today is the French reason for having initiated Ethiopia's blossoming into "nationhood" by joining the League: France thought Britain intended to seize Ethiopia and hoped by this means to block the seizure.
Mistake No. 2: Although the history of Ethiopia teems with instances in which peaceful white penetrators have been duped, swindled, robbed of concessions and even murdered, Il Duce made the mistake of attempting to do 20th Century business with Ethiopia.
Mistake No. 3: When Ethiopia's wily Emperor ran true to immemorial form, balking Italian concessionaires and bilking II Duce with the too-shrewd tricks of an Afric people's despot, Dictator Mussolini made the cardinal mistake of not educating world public opinion by a campaign of publicity such as Germany has waged for years, yowling from every vantage point how she has been wronged.
Instead II Duce committed his Sin No. 1. Nauseated by what seemed to him the futility of the League of Nations and the many failures of international conferences to settle anything, the Dictator made a separate and sinful pact with France, which sold him for a definite quid pro quo the right, so far as France was concerned, to exercise a "free hand" in Ethiopia (TIME, Jan. 14, 21).
This sin against the Covenant of the League of Nations was committed with the nation which had always been the Covenant's leading champion, France. It was compounded at Stresa later, when Mussolini and Laval encountered no rebuke or opposition to their public sinning from James Ramsay MacDonald, then British Prime Minister, and Sir John Simon, then Foreign Secretary (see p. 18).
Mussolini's Sin No. 2 in the present crisis, his use of war as an instrument of national policy, similarly depends upon the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928. From the vantage ground of these two lofty technicalities, Sir Eric Drummond, the Ambassador of Victoria's grandson, was entitled to gaze reproachfully upon Benito Mussolini last week and did in fact so gaze.†
Sin No. 3 is that Italians have been ordered to fight and kill. Benito Mussolini knows that for this there is no excuse, if it be "murder," but if ecclesiastical authorities decide he is making "war" they may be expected, as in the case of all previous wars, to decide that it is a "just war" and no sin.