Leagues of Nations

Since the death of Poland's Marshal Joseph Pilsudski there has been no picturesque, magnetic figure in Eastern Europe to compare with Hungary's Admiral Nicholas Horthy. He lives with quarterdeck simplicity in a small palace on the heights of Buda overlooking Pest, rules with the title of "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary," gives the most brilliant balls in Europe in the Habsburg Palace across the way from his own, but never sleeps on the premises of the King and Emperor who does not exist in fact, although by legitimate inheritance the throne belongs to Archduke or Kaiser Otto, exiled in Belgium. When experts of the Hungarian general staff advised Admiral Horthy that Ethiopia could not be conquered in a single season by the Italians, as it later was, he scoffed openly and sent them packing, has long made no secret of his pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler leanings. Startling to Hungary last week was a demand by His Serene Highness, in one of his extremely rare public speeches, for the setting up of three Leagues of Nations.

Hitler and Mussolini dislike the League of Nations but the suggestion of Horthy was believed in Budapest not to displease Berlin or Rome. His Serene Highness proposed that there be a European League, an Asiatic League and an American League --each to mind its own business. Anyone who knows Admiral Horthy is familiar with his sulphurous epithets for Stalin, and the Soviet Union--since two-thirds of its area is in Asia--would "naturally" belong only to his Asiatic League. The U. S. would be parked in the American League. Thus the European League would be chiefly a cozy corner dominated by Britain, Germany, France and Italy--exactly the team Benito Mussolini has been trying to get going ever since he got its members to sign his Four Power Pact (TIME, June 19. 1933. et ante). Admiral Horthy, with a fine patriotic eastern European sense of the comparative unimportance of Asia and the Americas, picturesquely suggested that the Asiatic League, the American League and the European League should each have its head office in Geneva. Adept at talking big themselves, Hungarians relished their Regent's grandiose project, improbable as a Hungarian opera.

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