WHY NOT TRY GOD?

Premier Laval is displaying amazingly little of the clear logic for which his race has been historically noted in his present efforts to smooth over the annoying little unpleasantness in East Africa. Piously dressed in his Sunday-go-to-Geneva best, Mr. Laval suggests that if only Great Britain will recall her fleet from the Mediterranean and leave her children, Gilbraltar, Malta, and Egypt, to be watched over by the eye of heaven alone, Mussolini will stop cringing from fear and beat his swords into plowshares for use on the Roman Campagna.

Typical of the tongue-in-check attitude Laval has maintained all through the present crisis, this new suggestion takes no account of the fact that Mussolini's appetite for southern dainties must be appeased and that the removal of the British fleet would make the Mediterranean "Mare Nostrum" indeed.

Admitting with a cynicism which one would think too callous even for Gallic minds, that the League of Nations has never been more than a stooge for her own European machinations, France is unwilling to lift even one tapering Parisian finger to raise it out of a chaos in which slie has no interest. Now that the League has done its dirty work, France finds herself in the embarrassing position of the housewife who must once and for all get rid of an old servant without having the neighbors accuse her too loudly of cruelty and ingratitude.

Since the British have always been realists, they cannot fail to see in this proposal anything but the ruse it is. To give Mussolini a free hand, while indefinite peace proposals are made by a disinterested party, would be a form of imperial suicide of which London has not yet been guilty.

Sanctions, as severe, as necessary, are even more urgent now than they were two weeks ago, and it appears hopeful that in the absence of French cooperation Britain will play her own hand against the rising Caesar. It must be evident to all the world that Laval's suggestion is merely another attempt to dissuade Britain from tuning up at Geneva a motor for which France has no further use.