Chamberlain's Hat

Punch readers last week saw Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain watching like a pastoral shepherd the cooing of doves of peace and the gamboling of two spring lambs, respectively the British Ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy, Lord Perth, and Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law (see cut). To a loudly cheering audience in his native Birmingham last week, the Prime Minister predicted that when the Anglo-Italian Treaty which Perth & Ciano have now negotiated in Rome is made public officially "It will be found that it is not the Prime Minister who has been fooled but it is the Socialists and Liberals who have fooled themselves.

"If not," cried Neville Chamberlain with unusual vehemence, "I will be prepared to eat my hat!"

The reliably reported content of the draft treaty as it stands today (subject to minor alterations before it is made public and offered for ratification in London and in Rome) was scooped last week by famed "Augur" (see p. 55). The regular press services soon afterward had it from highest British and Italian quarters. In general the treaty is to secure against Italian aggression British trade routes and spheres of influence on the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and to secure against British aggression the Italian trade routes and territories in this area, including Ethiopia (see map). The treaty would become operative after Italy withdrew her men from the territory of the Rightist Spaniards; and Britain would undertake to get the Italian Empire recognized by all members of the League of Nations, including Britain.

In London, meanwhile, there were two bye-elections last week, one in which the Conservative member was returned without any opponent having dared to stand against him, another in which the Conservative candidate was defeated by Laborite Dr. Edith Summerskill, who thus becomes the twelfth female M.P. Dr. Summerskill had fought her Labor campaign as much as possible in the vein of defending handsome young Conservative Anthony Eden against the Conservative Prime Minister, so His Majesty's Government were chagrined to lose this bye-election.

Two more bye-elections are due soon, and last week the Prime Minister and new Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax swung into a series of local addresses by which they hope to educate British public opinion in their real points of view. Of Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax said: "I look forward to the time when the country will again enjoy the benefit of his service and guidance in its administration! . . . It is no fault of the League of Nations and still less of His Majesty's Government, but . . . if we were to act as some suggest and try to organize a new pattern of collective security against Germany by the present League powers we should be doing the very thing that would be not only on the long view destructive of the hope of winning Germany and other powers back to European cooperation, possibly in some new form, but also we should be doing something against which we have always worked, namely, the division of Europe into blocs formally ranged against one another and which in our view must greatly aggravate the risk of ultimate catastrophe.

"We desire to improve our relations wherever we can because we believe that if we can relieve tension anywhere we relieve it everywhere. We have already succeeded largely."

The mandate of the present House of Commons, in which Chamberlain & Halifax have an overwhelming majority, does not expire until 1940 and His Majesty's Government hope by then to go to the country on a record of having: i) made peace with Italy, 2) promoted the ending of the civil war in Spain, and 3) joined Britain, Germany, France and Italy in a four-power Peace Pact, preliminary to the return of Italy, Germany and ultimately Japan to the League of Nations.

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