Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/32

 of men from antiquity to our days. To judge him is for the future. He failed, he had to fall—but to die? The guilt of Berlin and the Ballplatz, of generations, and methods of education, and guiding traditions, and tendencies is to be judged by the event, which is not to be expiated by the murder of a single man. Tisza was named a criminal and traitor to his country—he was apotheosised—upon him were flung stones and roses, as to few others. Could all the illusion be for, and all the truth against, him?

He had much guilt in the matter of the war, doubtless very much guilt. Others, too: and precisely many among those who fell with wild howls upon the corpse and, anxious for themselves, damned the dead, to help the living to their "rights." Even in the first press comments was evidenced a lack of backbone not to have been expected from the numberless creatures who had basked in the sunshine of his power. They left the dead unburied, although they had sung praises to the living unconditionally, even when those praises were a shameful fraud on the people and betrayal of the truth. I have regarded it as natural that the overthrow of this strongest, most forceful, most domineering man, should not be wept by his enemies: cynicism from that side seemed to me to be very well; but that his worst enemies should conduct the last campaign of the voices of the press against him, while the press in his favour slinked in pitiful cowardice, this should by no means be forgotten. To rescue the little Ego there occurred a change of tune without parallel. It was then, in truth, very dangerous to mourn for Tisza. To-day when the bloodless Revolution has attained security, and grants her protection even to her opponents—to-day it is still the same men, who with windy side-attacks and hidden motives commit the same betrayal with the guilt of which they had before loaded themselves.

Tisza had been murdered. Might that be a sign?

No. Nothing followed. It was not an act of vengeance of the Hungarian people, to whom common murder has never in their history been a means to an end. It was a common band of crude rascals who struck down a man already