Intensification of the self-sufficiency campaign in Italy was foreshadowed yesterday by Signor Mussolini in an address before the Central Corporative Committee of the Economic General Staff. Il Duce ordered all Italians to tighten their belts and do without foreign products.
The Minister of Corporations, Signor Lantini, said the Committee was elaborating two plans. The first would ensure self-sufficiency before 1941, and the other looked farther ahead.
Meanwhile, a reproach to the "alarmist press in great democracies" is contained in a semi-official bulletin stating that Italian volunteers in Spain are infinitely less numerous than the foreign press pretends.
"It is grotesque," the communique declares, "to speak of 110,000 men, as the French press does. The threat of opening the Pyrenees frontier causes no special concern to Italy. Such a situation would be examined with complete calm."—Reuter,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.