Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/48

 of Europe will not permanently be able to bear this excess of purging through separate nationalities, without suffering grave damage thereby.

One epoch-making item of the Programme was at once brought to the point of fulfilment. The franchise law, fundamentally modified, was put upon a new basis. It had already appeared, upon the Programme, that it was the most radical conceivable suffrage law, which gave to a preponderant mass of men the equal, secret, inassailable right to determine its own representation.

Already these two forward steps must have clearly shown that the taxing and executive power of the State reposed in hands reliably radical. And the establishment of woman's franchise, active and passive, redounds to the fullest honour of the young régime.

The National Council, meantime, had been enlarged; and in this, too, reason was the guide.

A chaos was avoided by the prompt transference of the Administrative functions from the National Council to the special Ministries. In the countries of the late revolutions, with national representations forming a centralised system, the intention to retain power in their own hands has been made evident; but in the young Hungary there was a better way discovered, and it was the National Council itself which devolved every sort of executive function, and reserved for itself only the clearly defined, political duties which, as the point of organisation of the Revolution, belonged to it. In this way no questions of competence arose, whose cropping up was much to be feared. Such processes always lead to internal splits, which must end in castrophes—as in Germany, to say nothing of Russia.

The curiosity of those days was in my eyes always the Cabinet, to which men of the most diverse shades of opinion belonged, and worked in friendly co-operation. The Social Democrats filled their office with the greatest political self-control, and I heard from a really well-informed source that in these critical days no kind of