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international gold standard led to such depressed economic conditions that Mussolini adopted a much more active foreign policy; in 1934 Italy replaced orthodox economic measures by a totalitarian economy functioning beneath a fraudulent corporate facade. Italy was dissatisfied over its lack of colonial gains at Versailles and the refusal of the League to accede to Tittoni's request for a redistribution of the world's resources in accordance with population needs made in 1920. In a series of agreements with Austria and Hungary known as the "Rome Protocols," the Austrian government under Engelbert Dollfuss destroyed the democratic institutions of Austria, wiped out all Socialist and working-class organizations, and established a one-party dictatorial corporate state at Mussolini's behest in 1934. Hitler took advantage of this to attempt a Nazi coup in Austria, murdering Dollfuss in July 1934 but he was prevented by the quick mobilization of Italian troops on the Brenner frontier and a stern warning from Mussolini. Page 572 Hitler's ascension to office in Germany in 1933 found French foreign policy paralyzed by British opposition to any efforts to support collective security or to enforce German observation of its treaty obligations by force. As a result, a suggestion from Poland in 1933 for joint armed intervention in Germany to remove Hitler from office was rejected by France. Poland at once made an non-aggression pact with Germany and extended a previous one with the Soviet Union. In 1934, France under Jean Louis Bathou, began to adopt a more active policy against Hitler seeking to encircle Germany by bringing the Soviet Union and Italy into a revived alignment of France, Poland, the Little Entente, Greece and Turkey. Page 573 France's Laval was convinced that Italy could be brought into the anti-German front only if its long-standing grievances and unfulfilled ambitions in Africa could be met. Accordingly, he gave Mussolini 7% of the stock in the Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway, a stretch of desert 114,000 square miles in extent but containing only a few hundred persons (sixty-two according to Mussolini) on the border of Libya, a small wedge of territory between French Somaliland and Italian Eritrea, and the right to ask for concessions throughout Ethiopia. While Laval insisted that he had made no agreement which jeopardized Ethiopia's independence or territorial integrity, he made it equally clear that Italian support against Germany was more important than the integrity of Ethiopia in his eyes. France had been Ethiopia's only friend and had brought it into the League of Nations. Italy had been prevented from conquering Ethiopia in 1896 only by a decisive defeat of her invading forces at the hands of the Ethiopians themselves, while in 1925, Britain and Italy had cut her up into economic spheres by an agreement which was annulled by a French appeal to the League. Laval's renunciation of France's traditional support of Ethiopian independence brought Italy, Britain and France into agreement on this issue. Page 574 This point of view was not shared by public opinion in these three countries. Stanley Baldwin (party leader and prime minister) erected one of the most astonishing examples of British "dual" policy in the appeasement period. While publicly supporting collective security and sanctions against Italian aggression, the government privately negotiated to destroy the League and to yield Ethiopia to Italy. They were completely successful in this secret policy. The Italian invaders had no real fear of British military sanctions when they put a major part of their forces in the Red Sea
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