Wheel & Ball

Italians rebutted as best they could last week against Sanctions. Dictator Mussolini, who some weeks ago persuaded fruitful Hungary, traditionally "Italy's bread-basket," not to join in Sanctions, last week signed a trade accord in Rome with the Hungarian Minister "to insure adequate food supplies."

Pouncing on the lira accounts in Italy of London banks, including funds of many maiden ladies and widows who find Britain's climate too bleak, II Duce blocked all payments out of these accounts. Simultaneously gold was declared a State monopoly but Italians were not ordered to turn it in. If they would deposit it with one of the State banks they were offered 5% interest on the value of the metal and its "return within one year in gold of the same weight and fineness."

Since Italy has to import nearly all her paper pulp, the Dictator merged all his country's cellulose and paper firms last week "for coordination and acceleration of production"' Wealthy Italians, accustomed to write on notepaper folded in sheets of four or eight surfaces, followed Crown Prince Umberto who cut himself down recently to chits of one sheet. Last week H. R. H. weeded out of his peacocky wardrobe all suits and haberdashery from Sanctionist countries, ordered new royal gear 100% Italian. Next the vast gardens of his palace at Turin were plowed up at his orders, sown with grain "as an example to all householders."

Even with gasoline at a new war price of $1.20 per gal. many Italians continued to drive their cars, but the Fascist Press clarioned "Use your car only for business! On pleasure bent take a train or a bus." Excited schoolchildren, marshaled by their teachers, shrilled "We want no heat in our schoolrooms all winter!" Outside school hours Fascist moppets of both sexes scampered about collecting scrap metal for II Duce. He contributed quantities of bronze busts of himself for melting into bullets. A Royal Duke chipped in three pounds of gold. While priests collected wedding rings for the State, the Archbishop of Milan coined golden words: "God is with Italy and Italy with God! Our soldiers in Ethiopia are destroyers of the chains of slavery and assistants of the Lord."

With 1,000,000 Italians under arms, of whom some 300,000 are in Ethiopia, Dictator Mussolini announced that "to fight the Sanctions Siege in the economic trenches" furloughs of three months will be given to 100,000 soldiers. These will return to their farm or city jobs, on call at 24 hours notice to spring back to arms.

Neither these rebuttals to Sanctions nor Sanctions themselves were last week of more than moral interest. Italy is basically so poor in natural resources and in cash that never in modern times has she been able to make more than a roulette player's cast on the world's battlefields for the supreme prize of Power. The classic roulette odds of 36 to 1 approximately represented Italy's chance to conquer and to hold against other players, all of Ethiopia, even before sanctions were declared. But it is possible to win heavily at roulette.

Last week the great wheel of war and the little white ball of sanctions had only begun to whirl in opposite directions. The diplomatic croupiers of Europe's green tables were fingering below the cloth and there were plenty of buttons, pressure on which could make the wheel and ball "behave." To Paris from London again crossed last week minor Croupier Maurice Peterson, chief of the Ethiopian section of the British Foreign Office, to dicker further with his French colleague, minor Croupier Count Rene de Saint-Quentin. They have been in substantial agreement for weeks on a formula of "honorable" division of Ethiopia "within the framework of the League of Nations." Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, however, is for keeping the ball of sanctions going a while longer and Dictator-Mussolini is all for faster spinning of the wheel by his new war chief. Marshal Pietro Badoglio (see p. 15).

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