Durate! Carry On!

In the battle back to Prosperity, pugnacious Benito Mussolini was again last week to the fore.

"The north wind is blowing," he told Fascist stalwarts massed outside his Roman office, "but it is spring! Five months ago I told you this would be a hard winter, but that we would live through it. From now on I will be thinking of next winter.

"I tell you--and you know I keep my promises--that next winter there will be more work and more help for all the people of Italy. The watchword will be 'durate' [carry on] !"

Englishmen are shouting "Buy British!" instead of "Carry on!" but urbane Sir Ashley Sparks, U. S. chief of the Cunard Line, landed in Manhattan last week with an air of durate.

"Great Britain has faced both her financial mistakes and her social and political untruths," said Sir Ashley, "with the result that she has stopped going down. In a world that is still sliding she appears even to have started on the long climb back. But whether this is so or not it is abundantly evident that she has applied the brakes and is once again within control."

In Paris the Bank of France again increased its phenomenally huge gold holdings last week and the French Line was able definitely to announce that France will complete the super-Ile de France, a ship larger and faster than any now afloat and the first transatlantic liner with "American type" turbo-electric drive. With a new State subsidy behind this French prosperity project, some 4,000 Frenchmen were riveting like so many steelpeckers all over the great hull last week, expected to launch her in October 1932, complete her for service in 1934.

Lithuania seemed last week the little nation proudest of its prosperity. "We hardly notice that there is an economic crisis," boasted the Lithuanian Foreign Office spokesman, Dr. Pranas Dailide, in Kovno.

"This country is almost entirely agricultural. All told, we have only 8,000 industrial workers, and 85% of our population live on farms. The farmer produces for himself what he needs so we have been able to regulate our imports according to our exports. We could, in fact, at any time stop imports altogether if that were necessary.

"Every country bordering upon us or near us has had to adopt stringent measures against the exportation of capital, but not Lithuania. The litas continues to be worth ten American cents, as it always was.

"Our foreign debt consists merely of $10,000,000 which we borrowed from the United States. That represents only about 40% of one annual budget. Besides, we have 62 years in which to pay it and the Hoover moratorium gave us an extra year."

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