Site Ed. Note: Those lacking hindsight into history who today find fault with the role of the United Nations and the United States in particular in acting as world policeman on the shabby conduct of nations big and small toward others and even its own need not look very far into history to gain an appropriate lesson. There is no such thing as living in a world and being left alone by it in splendid isolation. Would perhaps that it were, it has never been so.

Signor Mussolini retorts to Sweden, angry over the destruction of a Swedish Red Cross unit in an Italian air raid, that the raid was "perfectly justified" by the "proved fact" that the Ethiops had chopped off the heads of two Italian airmen who fell in the same neighborhood.

It is as much to say that a householder who, having seen his home broken into by burglars and members of his family murdered in cold blood and who retaliates by shooting one of the criminals, thereby gives the rest sound cause to rob and murder further.

Nor is there any sense in the doctrine sometimes put forward that such an analogy does not apply in the case of a nation. For it is clear that crime is still crime regardless of whether it is committed by one man or a hundred men or thirty million men.

Signor Mussolini is in Ethiopia without any shadow of legal or just right; he is there, according to his own bald professions, on robbery bent. And his use of airplanes to attempt to bomb a whole people into submission is as truly murder in the first degree as any deed ever committed by any Dick Turbin of them all. His case is without justification in its very essence. And his attempt to find excuse in the execution of a pair of his butchers will leave the world wholly unconvinced.

Most of us, indeed, will think that they got only what they roundly deserved.