Princess, Banks, Wheat, War

By no means is Crown Prince Umberto one of the many Italian aristocrats who have rushed to the war in Ethiopia. Amid nationwide furor last week his wife, Belgian-born Crown Princess Marie-Jose, showed where she stands by engaging passage to sail for Ethiopia as a Red Cross nurse this week.

Meanwhile Benito Mussolini wound up an exciting three weeks of clapping all the kingdom's principal banks under control of the Bank of Italy--i. e., "nationalized banking." He decreed that foreign tourists who have been getting about twelve lire for a dollar will hereafter get around 16 lire by buying in their home countries new-style Italian lire travelers' checks.

The entire Italian wheat-marketing industry was nationalized by Il Duce as another war emergency measure last week. '"Middlemen have been abolished!" local Fascist Party secretaries told the peasants. "You will now bring your wheat to Government warehouses, and Italian millers will no longer receive wheat from any other source than these Government warehouses."

Thus another nail was driven into the common fallacy of supposing that Italian Fascism exists to maintain the Italian capitalist status quo. Instead, under pressure of Sanctions and the cost of the Ethiopian campaign, Italy is becoming at ever faster tempo a kingdom in which the individual capitalist has less & less that he can boss.

In Rome this week the Dictator signed with Austria and Hungary a pact wherein Italy is said to guarantee Austria against the long-threatened move of Germany to absorb the Vienna regime. In an oration virtually predicting European war at no distant date Benito Mussolini cried, "The wheels of Destiny are running fast!" He made world headlines once more with a new version of the grand old news that Italy's guilds or corporazioni are some day going to be invested with the powers of Italy's political Chamber of Deputies.

The Chamber of Deputies was "abolished" once & for all last week, according to Il Duce, but he further declared, "Formal inauguration of La Camera del Fasci e delle Corporazioni [The Chamber of Fasce and Corporations] will depend on the successful conclusion of the Ethiopian War and upon developments in the European political situation!"

After this confusing announcement Dictator Mussolini stated with precision that his Fascist Grand Council is proceeding to nationalize all Italy's large industries so as to put the kingdom on a 100% prepared-for-European-war basis.

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