North Canterbury Gazette FRIDAY, APRIL 2, 1937 CRINGING TO ITALY

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 6, Issue 64, 2 April 1937, Page 4

North Canterbury Gazette FRIDAY, APRIL 2, 1937 CRINGING TO ITALY

Since it is difficult to sympathise with a man who goes abroad to attack his own country, there will be indignation in England over the remarks made in New York this week by Mr Herbert Morrison. If Britain has “cringed to “Italy,” the place in which to say so is London; and, since Mr Morrison is a member of the House of Commons, the place in London is Westminster. If he has not lifted his voice there, he has no right to lift it in New York; and no very strong right to repeat in New York what he may have shouted from the house-tops in London. In any case, he is barking up the wrong tree. It is not fear of Italy that has made Britain so weak, but fear of the thing that Italv is illegally lighting. Thousands, and perhaps millions, in England believe that the Spanish Government is Anti-Christ. The Irish Brigade, for example—it is probably about half a company — offered its services to Franco to fight for the Christian religion (side by side with the Moors). The sentimental (as opposed to practical) Royalists of England think that Franco is fighting with the lion and the unicorn, for somebody’s crown. The “right“thinking people” tell themselves that he is fighting for law and order. Opponents of economic change know that he is fighting for “the system” Fascists support him because he is fighting Communism and Moscow. Big business likes him because it thinks that he likes it. And so it goes on. But whatever reason people in England have for supporting rebellion and direct action, their beliefs and arguments and promptings and secret pressures have enough influence on the Government to divide and confuse it. Mr Eden is “lying down” because fewer than half of his fellow Ministers will stand up with him. He has the support neither of the classes nor of the services, and has been compelled for months to save his face with ingeniously strung-together phrases. And all the time the Italians know that England would sooner have Spain “saved” from Rome than from Berlin or Moscow. They know that a considerable section of the British public—the section that at present has most influence on national policy—would be glad to see the rebels sweep right through to Barcelona; that England had an opportunity to negotiate the Italians out of Italy before the “gentlemen’s “agreement” was signed, and did not take it; that the approaching reconstruction of the British Government will make it less liberal; and that France is even more anxious than England to avoid trouble in the Mediterranean. It is a situation in which the temptation to a further gamble is strong in Rome and the demand for bolder measures weak in London; but it is not likely, all the same, that Italy will go entirely mad. Apart from anything else, the initiative at present is not with Franco but with the leaders of the strangely assorted Government armies, who are at last finding ammunition and guns. Instead of a further attempt to crush the Government from the outside, we may expect to see a united effort to bring peace by negotiation, Britain and France

exercising pressure because they do, not want either side to win, Germany and Italy because time is now on the side of the Government. The uncertain factor in that case will be the influence of Russia, which knows better than any other Power what the internal situation really is, and whether immediate peace or further confusion is favourable to Communism.