Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/43

 worthy of having any words wasted on them, and these living men are to-day so dead, that a burial service over these political corpses would lack the true grave-side significance. But to throw all the men of a period into the same stew-pot, merely because they were contemporaries, is feeble and laughable in its effect. It is not for me to mention names: a personal intention may be scented, where none is. But the fact is important.

I will therefore only briefly refer to one figure.

Count Julius Andràssy is a personage of European fame, whom Hungary is impotent to abolish politically: he can only be deprived of power, which, however, does not touch his worth. To so violent a belittling of him the logical retort abroad must have been, how then was it possible that this man, if he really had all the faults ascribed with shrieks to him, could have been for ten years the political leader that he was. The reply that it was all politics-by-force is unjust. Andràssy has known how to make himself, to maintain, and even quite highly to distinguish himself, as a politician; has known through it all how to keep up a European tone, and has given costly refusals to cheap advertisement. He evinced a clear understanding and keen discernment, and riot to the least part of the worth of his personality are to be attributed many sympathies which Hungary now enjoys. Andràssy is now a branch sawn off, and the former régime of force has now emphatically become an affair of personal politics. But to want to make a Jack-pudding of a man whom the outer world values, respects, prizes, and looks upon as a representative person, of a man, in short, of the statesman-class by his innate capacity—this is a beginning that can only result in discredit. The political constellations have transformed themselves; people who wish to have a hand in things will naturally have to adapt themselves: but proof by negation is ever a weak way of reasoning. The voice of the people does not now allow of entering into any understanding with any name of the old school; but the denial of genuine human worth is lamentable, and I pity the busy reporter (who in Budapest is too often permitted to meddle in politics), because of his problem