THE LEAGUE: Odor of Oil

If the prestige of the League of Nations is to be saved by restraining Benito Mussolini, obviously France and Britain must do the hog-tying. In Paris swart, astute Premier Pierre Laval picked the strongest possible delegation of pro-League French statesmen to go with him this week to Geneva. Portly, pipe-sucking Edouard Herriot and fluffy-maned, impassioned Joseph Paul-Boncour, both onetime Premiers, are the two big League guns, but they are flanked by pontifical old Henry Berenger, Chairman of the French Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and kinetic Deputy Paul Bastid, the Chamber’s Foreign Affairs Chairman. Though French public opinion remained friendly to Italy last week it also remained pacifist and continued to regard the League as a vital strut in the structure of Security—in France a word more magic than Peace.

Suddenly came the bombshell that Ethiopia’s Emperor, like an incipient bankrupt who hastily transfers his assets, had handed oil concessions covering more than half his realm to a British Master of Foxhounds with swank London connections (see p. 23). Instantly the French Left Parties, hostile to Capitalism and to Imperialism, were alert. M. Herriot and the other Leagophiles began to wonder if British League of Nations Minister Anthony Eden, who had been slated to preach to the League Council this week about Right & Justice, was not either duped or duping. Paris detected a nauseating odor of oil from the direction of London, and this perfectly suited strong-nosed Pierre Laval.

The Premier promised Benito Mussolini a “free hand” as to Ethiopia when they last met in Rome (TIME, Jan. 14, 21). Ever since, M. Laval has hoped that it might be possible to pass off a Fascist conquest of Ethiopia at Geneva by giving it some other name than “war.” It might, for example, be called a “colonial expedition.” Early last week M. Laval suggested the advantages of this name to Sir George Clerk, but the British Ambassador reacted by freezing up. Without exactly saying so, Sir George intimated that the French may be the sort of people who would keep the League going and save Europe from unpleasant complications by letting Il Duce have his war under some sweeter name, but that His Majesty’s Government are not that sort of people. Few days later, when the odor of oil arose, it was like attar of roses in the black nostrils of peasant-born Pierre Laval.

“Bad Country!” Meanwhile last week Benito Mussolini was trying to repair the stupidity he has committed for months in not courting World public opinion. No democratic leader would have dreamed of preparing a war without making it appear Right & Just in advance. Il Duce, whose entire career has been studded with such aphorisms as “Fascism has already stepped and, if need be, will quietly turn round to step once more over the more or less putrid body of the Goddess Liberty!” finally bowed last week to the mob. From a Cabinet meeting at Bolzano amid Italy’s war games (see p. 21), the Dictator announced that Italy will expound before the League Council this week the troubled history of Italo-Ethiopian relations for the past 50 years “depicting Ethiopia as she is in her chaotic condition of retrograde slaveholding tribes with non-existent central power.”

Since membership in the League requires that the member state have a strong central government and eschew slavery, Il Duce’s drift was that the League can save its face by dropping Ethiopia as unworthy of membership and commissioning Italy, who has no slaves and does possess a strong central government, to bring the backward Empire up to date. Only thing wrong with this Fascist argument on its face was that in 1923, when inexperienced Benito Mussolini had been Premier of Italy for only a few months, the Italian Delegation stood sponsor to Ethiopia and enabled that Empire to enter the League.

Since it is doubtless too late for the Dictator to patch up that mistake in the public view, greater World interest focused on his other words last week at Bolzano: “Italy has a question to settle with Ethiopia. She does not have and does not wish to have questions with Great Britain. . . . The Fascist Government thinks that Italy’s colonial question should have no reaction on the European situation, unless one wishes to run the risk of letting loose a new World War in order to prevent a great power like Italy from bringing order to a bad country. . . . The Fascist Government believes that it will find in the League Council a group of responsible and wise men. . . .”

Thus the League Council, which let Japan conquer Manchuria from China and failed to punish Germany for breaking the Treaty of Versailles on which the League Covenant itself is based, is asked by Italy this week: Why get excited about Ethiopia ?

“If a decision should be taken against Italy I shall leave the League,” Il Duce told London’s Sunday Chronicle in a zero hour interview. “What I have started I will finish.”

Cracking back, Emperor Power of Trinity galvanized Ethiopia with an order for “general mobilization.”