23 AUGUST 1935, Page 17

THE ABYSSINIAN QUESTION

[To the Editor of TIM SPECTATOR.] Sin,—It is becoming increasingly clear that in the Rake Abyssinian question it is the deliberate intention of. Italy to challenge the whole position of Britain in the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal and herself to become the dominant power in those parts. It seems to me that we ought to do now what we ought to have done long ago, review the w hole question of our position in the Mediterranean.. The shores of that sea, the Black Sea of course included, are fringed by the coasts of some eleven independent States. To all of them the exits and entrances by the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal are of vital importance. Can we in the last resort justify as either natural or necessary the control of these international passages by our own individual nation ? Surely, to ask this question is to suggest an inevitable answer. There should be control, not by any single State, but by the League of Nations. The 'full implications of this could only be discussed at considerable length, but it may be sufficient to say this. If these passages were controlled by the League, traffic through them would go on exactly as it does now, with the exception (possibly at the moment not irrelevant) that they could be closed to any State waging what the League declared to be an aggressive war. If, in some combination of circumstances which seems extravagantly improbable, the Suez Canal were ever to be closed to ourselves, may we remind ourselves that we conquered India and held it through the Mutiny by means of sailing ships going round the Cape, and that at the present moment an Atlantic liner could get to India via the Cape in about fourteen days ?—Yours, &c.,