"Ridiculous Ninny!"

Since Germany would like to grab an African colony herself, German editors have lately proved themselves among the world's most adept at understanding and sympathizing with Italy's designs on Ethiopia. Noting this last week, Benito Mussolini abruptly canceled the exclusion order which for the past year has kept out of Italy some 30 Nazi papers, including Adolf Hitler's personal newsorgan the People's Observer.

Britain being surfeited with colonies, her moralizing newsorgans have been roundly roasting Il Duce. Last week he shut out of Italy the Manchester Guardian and London's Daily Herald, Sunday Express and Evening Standard. Then a secretary laid on the Dictator's desk a pair of cable reports which got under his ex-editor's skin. The New York Times had just taken new British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's strictures against dictators (TIME, June 17) as the text for an editorial observing: "Mussolini has kept himself in power longer than most people thought possible, but . . . any day a great public catastrophe or a vast shaking off of Italian fetters in order to be free might leave him helpless on the ground, a shorn Samson." The other cable informed II Duce that the Chicago Tribune thought King Victor Emanuel of Italy, who personally inspected Italy's colonies in Africa last year, is now opposed to Dictator Mussolini's plan to enlarge them.

Mad clean through, Signor Mussolini ordered instantly expelled from Italy the Tribune's Rome correspondent of seven-and-a-half years, David Darrah. He was hustled onto a train by Fascist police with only such money as he had in his pocket, Mrs. Darrah hastily rushing down from their home with a few necessaries in a suitcase. Snorted the Tribune's pugnacious publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick: "Send another man to Rome to replace Darrah? No, I don't think so. Why should I send a man there just to take Government handouts?"

Meanwhile II Duce had not expelled, nor was he likely to expel the most experienced handout accepter in all Rome, New York Times Correspondent Arnaldo Cortesi. Instead Dictator Mussolini barred from Italy for an indefinite period the New York Times, which continued to maintain Mr. Cortesi in Rome, printed a column from him on the subject of Mr. Darrah's expulsion.

With the deft technique of an old Roman hand, Correspondent Cortesi virtually called the Dictator's press staff liars but so suavely as not to excite their wrath. "According to the official story," he cabled, "no definite time limit was fixed for [Darrah's] leaving the country. . . . Against this last statement stands the fact that all Mr. Darrah's movements after the expulsion order had been shown him evidence the greatest haste."

In a pertinent oration to Sardinian troops last week Benito Mussolini reaffirmed one of his major credos: "Socalled public opinion abroad is nothing more than that of a ridiculous ninny!"

In increasingly drastic mood, Il Duce ordered Italians to surrender all silver coins in their possession for paper, his Government requiring the silver to pay campaign expenses in Africa where blackamoors remain unshakably convinced that no kind of paper money is any good.

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