Benito Mussolini has often been suspected of having a suppressed desire to sneak up behind the League of Nations when it wasn't looking and hit it on the back of the head with a stout club. If this has been the plan of the Italian dictator, Emperor Haile Selassie's telegram to Geneva is a good indication that he will not have to wait much longer for the desired nervous breakdown. No matter what answer the League makes to the walling message from Ethiopia, it is certain to pay the price of one of the major blunders of its history, and the price is deplorably stiff according to that organization's present shaky condition.

II Duce has not yet said what he will do if the League does right by Ethiopia and indicts Italy for the rape of the dusky virgin to the south. But Europe knows the stormy petrol of Rome well enough to be sure that strong-arm action on the part of Geneva will send the third illustrious guest belting from a party which he considers to be getting too wild to suit his simple tastes. With Italy, Germany, and Japan forming a harmonious trio off in a corner thumbing their noses at the League of Nations, France and Great Britain would find that they had something more important to worry about than the responsibility for a crime committed in remote Africa.

In its decision on Monday to wash its trembling hands of the Chaco affair and drop the bowling brat on the doorway of Argentine and Chile, the League cast before it the shadow of its inevitable conduct in this new crisis. It is faintly humorous that Baros Pompeo Aloisi should be the one to express on behalf of Europe boisterous applause at the policy of leaving American affairs in the hands of Americans. In a similar mood the League's reluctance to meddle in the private lives of her friends in Asia has already formed a none too bright chapter of world history. That Geneva will depart from this almost time-honored policy is hardly possible, especially with Mussolini being such a prominent player in the present chess game on the continent of Europe.

Although the League will probably placate Italy by winking at the array of troops, airplanes, and tanks on the Ethiopian borders, to the world at large such conduct can be nothing but the last straw. If, as seems almost inevitable, the League of Nations fails to give justice to this fourth-rate African power, it can be definitely challenged as having failed to observe its obligations, and in the future can be regarded as merely a convenient cloak, concealing without conspicuous success the machinations of European diplomacy.