Who Mussolini Is. By Ivor Thomas. Italian Foreign Policy. Barbara
Ward. (Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs. 6d.) THESE two Oxford Pamphlets are as full of substance as a couple eggs, and their objectivity is most refreshing in war-time. Cap Thomas is perhaps too inclined to brush aside the not inc siderable amount of social progress introduced by Mussolini, w out which the Italian dictator would hardly have been able enforce political regress for so long. To dismiss it all as m window-dressing, although there is plenty of that too, is a mist which in past years has often blunted the edge of anti-Fascism. is not by disregarding the social achievements of Fascist policy the " plutodemocracies " will finally refute it, but rather by cone proof that freedom remains now, as in the past, the only sound lasting foundation of social advancement. The reader wh Captain Thomas' profile of Mussolini may have inclined to exag ate the part of the Duce as the villain of Italian foreign policy, find a useful corrective in Miss Ward's pages; although, owing the needs of condensation, Italian policy from 1870 onwards app more steadily aimed at territorial expansion than it actually Junior students of international affairs will learn with surprise in the early 'thirties the duet between Fascist Italy and Soviet Ras played against France, was one of the major features of the E pean concerto. They may believe it or not, but the Italian cap was actually the first in Europe to' give a Foreign Minister of U.S.S.R.—M. Litvinoff himself—an official welcome, and a reception complete with Internationale; much to the amusement the Roman populace, ever most impervious to any kind of ideol be it totalitarian or otherwise.
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