Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/50

 that, the whole revolution. was a humbug, since real talent could not make itself felt: let the old paternal régime rule as before.

The Revolution therewith lost an adherent, and I believe I am not wrong in thinking that many such adherents quickly passed over into the other camp—into that camp that for the moment did not exist, yet ever and everywhere constitutes the Opposition, where the greed of individuals is not unconditionally and immediately appeased.

A chapter by itself is the question of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils.

The Soldiers' Council did excellent work in the way of preserving order, and high merit is to be ascribed to it and its leaders, especially to Dr. Josef Pogàny, a journalist, now Chief-Commissary of the Soldiers' Council.

The Soldiers' Council was, in Budapest, at once an element in Education. and an administrative organ, in which not politics was uppermost, but the organisation of a People's Army on the basis of the "vertrauungs-männer" system. The Soldiers' Council did not for a moment use its considerable influence for the inauguration of a reign of force: it worked rather hand in hand with the Social Democrat organisations and with the Cabinet, to the consolidation of which it was able to contribute greatly. And while the Russian Soldiers' Councils became the sources of the grimmest tyranny and despotism, the Hungarian Soldiers' Council developed into a centre for the soldiers' agenda, which did excellent service in respect of restoring human conditions in the barracks, of hygiene, of hospital questions, of the organisation of a people's army for the support of the Government and good order.

The fever, which slowly abated, became as heat-energy transmuted into "work." With the exception of those few who knew how to get something out of it, as out of the vast bloodshed of the nations—men, who, however, this time were struck down with lightning severity—with these exceptions the individual and the whole worked with an offering up of all their human