Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/42

 conversation between Kàrolyi and the King had been very short and sharp. The Monarch had spoken with Budapest from Pozsony, and he had then at once returned to Vienna. He intended to flee to Switzerland, as Vienna, too, had become unsafe.

I regarded this news as possible, even probable; and I record it because it seemed to me then like an irony of history, which even in her judgments does not forget the Symbol. Out of Switzerland fared the Hapsburgs of old into foreign lands, and now when their star vanished from heaven, and their earthly fortunes, as astrologers say in such cases, sank with the star, back they must needs go to the old soil, which endures in all the becoming and the passing away of men.

Fiat justitia

I must make mention of the late afternoon sheets, and of various private and semi-official utterances which already were being made about the old régime.

The chief objects of the attacks—beside the deposed magnates, Wekerle. Szterényi and Kursgenossen—were Count Andràssy, acting in Vienna, as Minister of the Exterior, and some gentlemen of the ancien régime, who as a body were exposed to the fiercest attacks.

At the time I thought to myself that this had to happen, in order to nip in the bud any possibility of the cropping up of conservative tendencies, this being accomplished by presenting every person at all prominent in an impossible light: I saw in it a system of self-defence through attack. What I now have to blame in it is its objective injustice. The People's Government is now strong enough to check the activities of unscrupulous elements. It is no longer justified to describe as criminal everyone who in some measure stands apart from the Revolution. But especially blameable is it to offer to foreign countries the spectacle, the inevitable spectacle, of the same known individual, who has torn them to shreds in his enmity, being himself torn to shreds with the same enmity of criticism. Pity that temper comes first and reason second.

I don't consider the discarded politicians