Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) FRIDAY, 4th SEPTEMBER, 1936. THE SPANISH REVOLT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 4 September 1936, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times (Established Over 60 Years.) FRIDAY, 4th SEPTEMBER, 1936. THE SPANISH REVOLT.

By Italy’s specific acceptance of tlie French non-intervention proposals in connection with the Spanish revolt, the tension has been relieved considerably. There is some disposition to view' this decision as indicating that Signor Mussolini feels Germany has been over-asserting herself in Mediterranean politics. But it need not be necessary to search for extreme subtlety in this move. Acceptance probably has a price attached .to it- There are, moreover, good reasons for Italian caution. The Vatican may feel resentment against Spanish church-burners, but it can find no consolation in supporting the other faction, which is enlisting Moslem tribesmen from Africa to slaughter Christians in Spain. On the political side, Italy has recently proclaimed a new African Empirfe; she has a heavy colonising task still ahead of her in Libya and in Abyssinia; the setting of native Africans against whites can find no place in her political schemes, whatever these may be. There can be little doubt that the French

authorities in Morocco are countering with all intensity, as necessarily they must, the Spanish militarists’ efforts to raise Moors for a bloocl-letting campaign against Europeans; nor any doubt, either, that this question must have been the subject of French diplomatic representations to the Government in Rome. That Germany should feel some secret satisfaction at French concern in the reaction for the loyalty of her African troops is understandable, but Italy can share such German feelings only at peril to herself in North Africa.