Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/10

 will; and that the word was spoken in Budapest, but the deed budded in Vienna. To have any illusions as to that was only pardonable so long as it was considered useful to be able to assign the blame for the war.

And so I come to the actual picture-gallery of the revolutionary events.

The revolution in Hungary was not organised, not manufactured, not menagé. It grew up freely, and just a dozen men sufficed to hold it together. A proof for or against? For! for the mass can only be moved by a summons relatively of the same elevation as itself. When the mass follows unknown leadership merely on recount of a programme, this means that it wills to co-operate. And it co-operated, without swerving, without heat, without fail.

They made a revolution, the Hungarians, because there was nothing else to do. Because the gigantic upkeep of a gigantic army was growing on their shoulders, because they saw the Hapsburgs sitting ever in Vienna as Emperor and never in Budapest as King (although in such a royal comedy, directed to eye and mind and phantasy, precisely the seeing of the idol is essential to the realisation of the fairy tale), and because they had frankly had enough of fighting without motive.

History shows no Hungarian war aims—only the aim imposed upon the country of going to the aid of Austria.

Lust of annexations was not the cause of the war, but the consequence—a decisive distinction. To annex was desired, because war was being waged, but no single shot was fired with the idea of getting something out of it.

Hungary's revolution was the historical consequence of a biological principle. The sick place had to be removed by operation: a non-national Government, which managed the affairs of an Empire without any relation to the people, which throughout its whole structure was antediluvian in its reactionary trend, had, in the atmosphere of our time, to perish.

What is instructive for history is the essentials of this event.

The recognition of the inevitableness of the break-up inspired the people who rallied round