Gloomy Sunday

The early tea of Foreign Minister Anthony Eden last Sunday was the bitterest brew he had ever had to swallow. Read the dispatches any way he would, there was only one conclusion: Benito Mussolini had effectively smashed Ethiopia, wrecked the League of Nations and given British prestige an enormous black eye.

The Italian adventure in Ethiopia was a direct threat to the lifeline of the British Empire: control of the Mediterranean. From the beginning British diplomacy held to the dogged belief that Benito Mussolini was bluffing. Loudly His Majesty's Government demanded Sanctions, only to discover that Italy would fight if the League attempted to enforce its orders.

Britain sent her fleet to the Mediterranean, talked of closing the Suez Canal.

Italy continued to ship troops to Africa regardless. British indignation caused the collapse of the Hoare-Laval Deal for ending the Ethiopian War, but British opinion was strongly against starting another war against Italy to save Haile Selassie's dark skin.

When Anthony Eden heard that the Ethiopian Emperor had fled, that Addis Ababa was a shambles of wild disorder, that only the speedy arrival of Italian troops would save the lives of British subjects, he realized that he had steered British Foreign Policy onto the rocks. To his constituents in Leamington, he gloomily admitted defeat:

"Whatever the lessons of the past seven months, we must be prepared to learn them and profit by them in a spirit of realism, keeping steadily before us what remains the constant purpose of British Foreign Policy--the maintenance of peace. We have nothing to reproach ourselves with, nothing to apologize for."

In an effort to save the remnants of the League, Anthony Eden and Stanley Baldwin met on Gloomy Sunday with a group of Foreign Office experts. It was almost certain that smaller nations would refuse to go on with Sanctions against Italy. Yet if the League Covenant were revamped to do away with Article XVI, which authorized the use of force in applying Sanctions, then the League could continue as an amiable debating society, publishing valuable works on the extent of white slavery, the opium traffic, and the migration of whales.

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