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struck the unstable economy of Japan with extraordinary force. Their profits threatened by sharpened competition in the world market, and further menaced by the growing discontent of the masses at home, the Japanese ruling class, as that of Italy and Germany, embarked upon a policy of intensified oppression at home and provocative aggression abroad. These are the main factors behind the development of fascism in Japan.

At the beginning of the present aggression against China, the outspoken fascist Admiral Suetsigu was appointed Minister of the Interior, with full powers for maintaining "civil order."

He proceeded rapidly to clean up the "rear" of the Japanese war machine by crushing all militant and progressive organizations in Japan itself, arresting their leaders and forcing them into illegality. He declared illegal the Proletarian Party of Japan, the League of Workers and the Peasants Councils of Japan, and dissolved the trade unions and peasant unions affiliated to these organizations in every part of Japan. He carried through the arrest of 15,371 members of these organizations, among them the well-known trade union leader and General Secretary of the Proletarian Party, Deputy Kato Kanju, the well-known peasant leader and Deputy, Kuroda Kiaso, four former university professors, and a large number of municipal councillors and officials. This list included the Baroness Ishimoto, the leading birth-control advocate in Japan.

Following the recent reverses of Japanese arms in China, Japan's rulers forced through the notorious National Mobilization Law, which transformed the country into a dictatorship under the navy and army command. Under this law, labor is virtually militarized, and industry and good are subject to military disposition. The meager democratic rights of the people were discarded, and an openly terroristic dictatorship

of the financial oligarchs and militarists was set up over the masses.

Italian fascism has committed the greatest single crime against the Negro peoples in the present period of world history--the rape of Ethiopia.

Japanese imperialism, through its aggression against China in 1931-32 and its defiance of the peace forces of the world at that time, brought about the general world situation which enabled fascist Italy to launch its war of 1935-36 against Ethiopia.

Prior to this war, the Japanese government had employed its demagogic pose of protecting the colored races in the service of its economic penetration of East Africa. Distance and Ethiopia's lack of a seacoast had hindered Japan from obtaining such a stranglehold on Ethiopia as she now has on the semi colonial colored people in Siam.

Prior to his war against Ethiopia, Mussolini's speeches had been anti-Japanese in trend.

But the war brought about a new relationship between Japan and Italy. Japan relinquished her Ethiopian perspectives and agreed that Ethiopia should be a province for Italian imperialism. This agreement was expressed in the Japanese recognition of the conquest of Ethiopia on December 2, 1936.

In return Japan sought Italian recognition of the colored people of China as the proper prey of Japanese imperialism. This agreement was expressed in Italian recognition of Manchukuo on November 29, 1937.

These facts show how intimate is the connection between the Italian fascists, the worst enemies of the Negro peoples of the world, and the Japanese imperialists, the colored attackers and oppressors of colored peoples.

These two predatory forces have joined in an attack upon world democracy at its weakest link, the British Empire. Capitalist democracy is weakest in its oppression of subject peoples. The hold of British capital on its subject peoples is slipping,