Site Ed. Note: This piece was the first editorial Cash had written for the Charlotte News since spring, 1928. It would be the first of forty two-bucks apiece freelance editorials for the News during the ensuing 22 months; Cash would then be invited to join the staff proper as associate editor. As Cash's colleagues posthumously reported in their 1948 anniversary issue and as biographers Morrison and Clayton affirmed in ensuing decades, the careful reader will find that most of these editorials read today like perfect history, though most of the events of which Cash wrote in 1935 through 1937 were then only warnings of what could happen if the warmongers of Europe and Japan were not early checked.

Within his first fifteen editorials of 1935-36, spanning three and a half months, Cash would tell those paying attention just what the war to come would look like, who would be the aggressors against democracy and who would be the defenders of it; he would also tell of the Nazi horrors already afoot and to come against the Jews, as his book reviews of the same period would likewise. Such was not the common staple of daily editorial journalism in North Carolina or elsewhere during this pre-war period prior to 1939. Too many in the United States were too preoccupied with struggling to keep food on the table to be too much concerned about matters across oceans. Such are our bitter lessons of history.

One must commend J. E. Dowd, editor of the News, for having the foresight to permit Cash, especially as a freelancer, to share his space. At least, those about Charlotte could not claim surprise when the inevitable occurred down the road.

And for those apologists here and abroad who try still to this day to claim that "no one knew" of the Nazi atrocities until the end of the war revealed the death camps, tell them that it just wasn't quite that way. They just didn't bother to read the newspaper.

Fiercely, like the cry of a wounded wolf, Mussolini bares his fangs and snarls his defiance of the nations. He is convincingly poised to spring, and it may be that Ethiopia will soon be forgotten as the desperate imitators of the Caesars deliberately creates a European ocean of blood for his own suicide.

Mussolini is no fool. Before he opened the African campaign he knew that his days were numbered. Economic pressure at home was about to crush him. The war of conquest against Haile Selassie, among other expedients, was a reprieve. He faced the alternative of being dragged ingloriously from power by his own people or of going to an heroic climax of either victory or defeat in war.

And now the nations are choking him and he prepares to play his final piece. The world these next few trembling weeks could pay an unspeakable price that Il Duce may exit that hero.