Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/56

 Men look like falling at present into the horrible mistake of driving a strong people to despair, of isolating, of strangling it, for the sake of certain systems—systems already shattered by the people itself—for the sake of certain persons or tendencies. The final consequence can only be pointed at as catastrophic.

What is at present being done by the small members of the Entente is a threat to European civilisation.

The Hungarian problem must be solved. The once Hungary is gone, and is most hated in Hungary itself. But let there be an insistence upon the principle set up by Wilson"A scrap of paper," occurs to me in regard to this: a scrap of paper, the tearing up of which invoked the greatest bloodshed of all times. Let men beware of such papers: and if to-day the Smallest of the Small with inflated arrogance regard the Fourteen Points, too, as merely "a scrap of paper," let not the catastrophe be lost sight of in the grotesque. A little more veering on the side of the Entente, a little more complacence and toleration must, as far as one can see, invoke an inner crisis in Hungary, essentially Hungarian and momentous, whose incertitudes the elements that aspire to Bolshevism will certainly take advantage of to their ends. This should be carefully noted.

On a somewhat frosty Sunday hundreds of thousands assembled at the Parlamentplatz, where what took place was without any special ceremony, so to say, springing out of a deeply-felt confession of faith. The day will be unforgettable to me, for through the humdrum old halls of the Parliament House blew the wind of a New Time, and it was a day of new men and new words, and something like a suppressed thrill filled the frame.

The Government, the National Council and the People had united here, and amid cares and trials, to support which a high love of country raises human strength, the foundation was laid on which is built Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Old memories whirled through my head; I imagined I saw things unfolding before me; known faces passed before me; thoughts con-