The Dominion MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1926. THE MUSSOLINI MENACE

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 78, 27 December 1926, Page 8

The Dominion MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1926. THE MUSSOLINI MENACE

Unstinted, almost unqualified, -was the credit given to that most strenuous of latter-day statesmen, Signor Mussolini, for many of his earlier official actions, notably his drastic reforms in the administration of the Italian State railways, and indeed in nearly every department of the public service. Admirable and most efficaciously vigorous also was his rooting out of the Anarchistic revolutionaries who had so long made happy hunting grounds of Milan and other industrial centres in the peninsula.

So far so good, but of late Signor Mussolini seems to have developed a Chauvinism so intense as to render Italy’s,, foreign policy an ugly menace to other European States, in particular France. Especially at the Quai d’Orsay would there appear to be much grave anxiety as to the future course of Franco-Italian relations. It may be admitted that too many Italian anarchists have in the past found refuge upon French soil and have made Marseilles and other French cities bases from which to direct and engineer political outrages on the eastern side of the Franco-Italian frontier. On the other hand, the French, even from the day when the Italian revolutionary, Orsini, attempted the assassination of Napoleon the Third in Paris, have time after time had only too just cause to complain of extremist revolutionary movements, in Lyons, Marseilles and other centres, having had their origin among their Latin neighbours on the south-east. To rate France so severely and unreasonably as did Signor Mussolini after the bomb-throwing outrage in Rome last September, accusing her of callous indifference and culpable negligence with regard to Anarchist crimes plotted on French soil was at the time roundly condemned by the leading European journals as being almost deliberately unjust. With regard to the new Chauvinistic scheme of an anti-French alliance between Italy and a Germany, in which Austria would be incorporated the Italian Press is now so notoriously under the Mussolinian thumb that even the slightest approach to adverse criticism in such a quarter need not be expected. At the same time it would be difficult for any careful student of Italian political history to accept as probable any undivided approval in the peninsula of such a project. For there must surely be many tens of thousands of patriotic Italians, more especially in Venetia, in the Trentino, and in Lombardy, who have still a keen remembrance of Austria’s long and tyrannous domination of those regions. During the Great War the struggle of the Italian armies to protect Venice and other northern cities from Austrian invasion was, so quite a number of historians have agreed, made doubly strenuous and determined by an intense patriotism, a cardinal point in which was a hatred of Austrian rule, and a horror of any return of those long and dreadful years of Austrian domination. Can it then be taken for granted that the rumoured project of an antiFrench combination in which Italy’s ancient enemy Austria would be a partner would be received with any great enthusiasm by the Italian people of to-day. We very much doubt it. Meanwhile, however, acting upon the old adage that where there is smoke there is likely to be fire, this new Italian or Mussolinian jingoism has evidently been taken rather seriously by M. Briand, whose Christmastide will probably be one in which grave anxiety will replace those feelings of serenity and positive joy which are the traditional appanages of the festive season. Assuredly Signor Mussolini’s latest Chauvinistic gesture, should it be confirmed after the coming meeting between the Italian and German Foreign Ministers is scarcely to be considered in keeping with that spirit of peace on earth and good will to all men, which at Christmas is supposed to, if in practice it does not, unreservedly reign on earth.