ITALY: Deed

A deed affecting 46,000 firms and the daily lives of 1,300,000 workers was done last week by Benito Mussolini. Shrilled Italian newsorgans: “This is II Duce’s method of proving to Italian workers that they would have nothing to gain from Communism and are better off under Fascism.”

The deed: new wage contracts upping pay 10% effective Aug. 16 and Sept. i were imposed on Italian industry by the Dictator’s favorite department of Government, his Ministry of Corporations which adjusts and controls the relations of all Italian employers and employes.

Additional new contracts go to Italian World War veterans whom II Duce has settled as colonists on the reclaimed Pontine Marshes about 50 miles south of Rome, a district infested for centuries with malaria but now ditched, drained, booming and blooming. Arriving at a Pontine farm which he helped sow with wheat last year, the Dictator last week pitched in under a broiling sun and helped thresh. Afterward, with sweat pouring down his dust-begrimed face, Thresher Mussolini presented his work slip for an hour’s labor, drew the regulation five lire (40¢).

Next day II Duce sent Italy’s “war babies,” the soldier class born in 1914, marching out to swell Italian forces of 200,000 which this week will turn part of southern Italy into a great arena of “war games” umpired by Crown Prince Umberto.

To the Quirinal Palace last week was called Sir Aldo Castellani, the great Anglo-Italian physician whose work as Sanitary High Commissioner for East Africa made Italians able to fool pessimists who said their army could never live and conquer amid the heat and pullulating pestilences of Ethiopia. Sir “Aldo’s title of British knighthood was superseded as His Majesty conferred on him the hereditary Italian title Count of Chisimaio.