Command Performance

When, in gold-frogged jacket and white-plumed hat, Sir Sidney Barton, Minister of His Britannic Majesty to the Ethiopian Court, climbed last week the steps of the Imperial Palace at Addis Ababa to deliver the terms of a peace proposal to give Italy approximately half of Ethiopia, His Excellency could scarcely have dreamed that his secret and urgent covering instructions would be published to the world a few days later in a British White Paper "by command of His Majesty George V."

What King George wanted everyone to know was that His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Samuel Hoare had cabled to Sir Sidney: "You should use your utmost influence to induce The Emperor to give careful and favorable consideration to these proposals and on no account lightly to reject them. On the contrary, I feel sure that he will give further proof of his statesmanship by realizing the negotiation which they afford and will avail himself of them".

As London rumor grew that the King is personally for this solution, famed Editor James Louis Garvin predicted in London's Conservative Sunday Observer that British public opinion hostile to The Deal will eventually rearrange itself and that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin "in due time will emerge with a moral triumph never surpassed in the House of Commons."

Signs of any such rearrangement were particularly scarce in India last week, both the vernacular and English language Press fulminating in the vein of New Delhi's Statesman: "The proposals are already dead. The Negus and the whole world will not have them. Sir Samuel Hoare has done irreparable damage to the Baldwin Government and to the moral leadership of Britain." No doubt Editor Garvin thought he was seeing eye-to-eye with King George when he added in the Sunday Observer: "Further sanctions intended to throttle Italy would set fire to the world. . . . The air would rain terrors of the Apocalypse. . . . All statesmen who had taken part in these woes would earn everlasting guilt."

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