"Localized Areas"

For the fifth consecutive week Africa's dreary little war supplied British politicians with material for solemn ruminations. If the British and their Navy meant business--if any real chance existed that His Majesty's Government would use their sea power to blockade and starve Italy as they once blockaded and starved Germany--then indeed everything else was secondary. Inside the massive head of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin the great issue continued slowly and comfortably to shape itself.

Its edges were rough fortnight ago when he spoke of the "extreme sanction" (blockade) as something into which not even the League of Nations could get Great Britain unless he knew beforehand what attitude the U. S. would take--i.e., that Washington would help. By last week Statesman Baldwin was rounding his rough notion smooth. "The most extreme sanction," he declared wisely at Wolverhampton, "would be a very difficult one in the absence of three countries now outside the League--America, Japan and Germany. . . .

"If any of those three countries wished to sell goods in the country which was being blockaded, unless they advised their subjects that they were not to trade with that country, with every shipload of goods they sent there would be a real risk of war with that country. . . .

"I would never sanction this country indulging in a blockade of that kind unless assured of the sympathetic support at least of those three great neutral countries. It would surely be the bitterest and cruelest irony of history if the League, in attempting to enforce peace in some localized area, only succeeded in setting fire to the world, starting a war which might run from Pole to Pole."

As the "Honest Broker" between Britain and Italy, French Premier Pierre Laval has based all his efforts upon convincing His Majesty's Government that the Ethiopian war is no world-shaking matter on which the League's future or Britain's depends but a mere affair of "some localized area." Last week the appearance of this phrase in a speech by Squire Baldwin was a leading development. Though some excited citizens still put the issue to themselves in terms of the necessity of preserving Ethiopian independence at all costs, many a British citizen was commencing to ask himself last week why Ethiopia must be aided to remain savage and backward. Not entirely for fun London's august Times printed in full a very long letter from George Bernard Shaw. Excerpts:

"Italy is making roads through Ethiopia with the avowed intention of colonizing the country. The Danakils are doing their utmost to stop the process by killing the road makers and their guards. The League of Nations is being strongly urged by Mr. Eden to assist the Danakils in killing the Italians with the object of stopping the road making and forcing Italy to retire discomfited, leaving the primitive tribesmen triumphant over European civilization. . . .

"As between the Danakil warrior and the Italian engineer, I, as a possible traveler or trader in those regions, am on the side of the engineer. . . .

"Old as I am, I am not yet so pitiably imbecilic as to believe that the modern habit of calling torpedoes, mines, blockades, sieges, battles and bombs 'sanctions' alters their nature so completely that to vote for sanctions is to vote for peace."

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