Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/12

 In the autumn of 1918 it was clear that the war was finally lost. The dictatorship built upon military authority and upon the infallibility of prerogatives was robbed of its basis. All began to totter. A current whose trend was indefinable gained in strength. The Emperor-King had become fond of the jewel of the love and warm co-operation of the people, even while he let himself be led ever farther into half-measures—in spite of a marked and quite genuine love of peace. He was called in the end "Karl the Sudden," just as in the beginning of his reign they called him "Wilhelm's Antidote."

The German retreat cast spheral illuminations over hill and valley. Fall on the Bourse, dissonances, confusion, rumours. Still Sisyphus pushed the stone ever up.

And then came the great Governmental crisis, the series beginning with the dismissal of Wekerle, the endless searches for lime and cement an unheard-of expenditure of men and forces.

And thenthen the word was: Kàrolyi could save the country. Save? I deny that. A man is only a man, and genius is powerless against the hydrophobia. Only some months earlier Kàrolyi could in truth have effected something, when, relying on a half-integral military power, he might have concluded a well-merited separate peace. But from within, outward, grow revolutionary forces, which do not suffice to supply the lack of actual armies. And so the appointment of Kàrolyi could only have availed to rescue the dynasty for hours or days. For radical democracy had to give so calre a field to the republican idea, that no dynasty could have withstood such a reality.

Once more, the Hungarian Revolution was a vote of the people. No kind of reactionary agitation, not the least, was to be remarked, and what agitation is now in existence, in so far as it is of any importance, is all ultra-radical. And a return to the old is desired merely by some odd people whose dulness only the Oriental parade of a Court could enliven.

While the revolutions in Germany, and especially in German Austria, have loosened sharp reactions; effective forces seeming to arise there to defend or to rehabilitate either the dynasty or the