ITALY: Map Dreams

Benito Mussolini loves maps. But when his eye leaves Italy, it finds only Libya, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland in Africa for Italian colonies. It is Asia, the East, that gives him the stuff for vast, cloudy dreams. What Japan has done in Manchuria, what France is doing in Yunnan, Italy may well do some day in the Orient.

Last week Foreign Minister Mussolini ordered the Italian Legation in Nanking raised to the rank of an Embassy, “to make it correspond with the importance of China as a great power and with the importance of the political, economic and cultural relations between Italy and China.” Only other Power to compliment Great Power China with an Embassy is Soviet Russia.