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"Wise & Faithful." Sir Eric, as he and the Dictator talked, received an impact so powerful that next day New York Timesman Ferdinand Kuhn Jr. cabled from London: "Last night the most urgent kind of warning reached the British Government from wise, faithful Ambassador Drummond to the effect that Mussolini was convinced Britain intended to make war upon him and therefore had poured new troops into Libya"—i.e. opposite the British position in Egypt.
Rome heard that Premier Mussolini, while still agreeable to maximum League exploitation for electioneering purposes, and while still standing on his public pledge not to reply to merely economic and fiscal sanctions with acts of war, demanded last week public retraction from London of what virtually the whole European Press was saying, namely that 147 British warships anchored on Italy's war flanks meant in substance: "Stanley Baldwin is out for Benito Mussolini's hide and that means the Dictator is through." This British massing of war boats, the Italian Government spokesman pointed out, was ordered by London on its own, has never been requested or endorsed by the League, and occurred prior to sanction activity. If it, too, was electioneering, II Duce was prepared to stomach a good deal, but he blazed at Sir Eric that from London there was a minimum which Italy also must obtain.
Another British Ambassador and another Premier, "Honest Broker" Pierre Laval, presently haggled out this minimum in Paris (see p. 15), but the urgent warning Sir Eric flashed to London had direct, immediate results. In London spade-bearded Italian Ambassador Dino Grandi was invited to Whitehall. There soothing assurances were poured into his ear by British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare. Next a public speech was made by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in which he declared that no British Government hostility exists toward Italian Fascism and none toward the Dictator.
Essence of Fascism. If the oft-told life of Benito Mussolini and the much-headlined events of his 13 years as Dictator are not easily recalled in an ordered pattern, passion is to blame. Since 1922 nobody has been able to write impartially about the man who made Dictatorship what it is today. Currently the nearest approach to such an analysis is Mussolini's Italy by Dr. Herman Finer of the University of London, a useful work since its author has just spent a year in Italy and tried to be fair (Holt, $3.75).
This Londoner concludes after much anxious research that "Fascism is Mussolini." In something between relief and desperation at his inability to formulate the essence of Fascism which so many Italians feel they have grasped by instinct, Scholar Finer adds: "The Fascist system depends on a genius, and with his passage it must pass."