ITALY: Sea Power

Signor Mussolini sped up the valley of the Tiber from Rome last week—up and up to crag-defended Perugia, the capital of Umbria. There he conjured a vision of sea power before men whose lives and thoughts are among mountains. Il Duce del Fascismo, smoldering-eyed,retold the ignominy of Rome before Carthage in the days when “Romans could not even wash their hands in the Mediterranean without permissionfrom the Carthaginians.”

Turning from despair to triumph, he sketched a broad, flamboyant panorama of the potent quinquerernes* which carried two Roman armies to Africa for the Third Punic War. By them Carthage was destroyed (146 B.C.). The Mediterranean became a Roman lake. . . .

Last week at Perugia the inference to be drawn from this ancient History was stark and plain. What was a Roman lake may become an Italian mill pond. While II Duce spoke, many a Perugian tingled with imperial dreams, forgot that the immediate occasion for ecstasy was the dedication by Premier Mussolini of a new college intended for foreign students at the ancient University of Perugia.

“Grandeur!” As usual the thick and resonant vocal chords of II Duce vibrated to a stinging peroration.

“I have a duty to accomplish. I have orders to respect. I have taken upon myself an engagement to give material and moral grandeur to the Italian people. That order, that supreme duty was not given to me by petty lawmaking-assemblies or by political circles, more or less clandestine. It was conferred upon me—and the heritage is sacred by reason of all the Fascists fallen in battle—by all, or almost all, the Italian people.

“See Fascism as it marches toward the celebration of the fourth anniversary of the march on Rome, while it prepares to enter the fifth year of rule. It was never stronger, never more compact, more solid than today.”

The London Daily Express featured during the week alleged revelations to the effect that Premier Mussolini has definite plans under way to seize from Turkey a portion of Asia Minor with the connivance if not the actual armed assistance of Greece.

*Galleys having five banks of oars, two more than those of the triremes (three-bankers) now flickering before U. S. cinema audiences in Ben Hur.