The Mirabeau of the Astoria was followed by the spokesman of the Social Democratic Party: Sigmund Kunfi-Kunstätter, the Minister for Public Welfare. He is said to be one of Lenin’s emissaries. His face is like a vulture’s, his eyes are cunning and inquisitive. After John Hock’s rhetoric and Károlyi’s disgraceful stutter, this cashiered Jewish schoolmaster, who has changed his religion three times for mercenary reasons but has remained faithful to his race, spoke with fiendish ingenuity. He mixed truths with utopias, promised and threatened, and in the certitude of his victory tore asunder the veil that hid the future. “By proclaiming this day a free, popular republic,” said Kunfi, “we have not only achieved great political progress, but we have started on a road of which the past revolution and this day are not the end but only important milestones.... Political freedom, the republic, the most radical political democracy, all these are only means which shall enable the great struggle, the fight between poverty and wealth, to start easier and under better auspices....” This is the battle cry of class-war, and till the war comes Kunfi offers as a narcotic social reforms: the levelling of poverty and wealth, land for the soldiers back from the front. And he promises that he will force the entailed estates, big capital and great industry, to give up everything that “justice” and the will of the people claim, and that in such a way that it will not interfere with the continuity of economic life. This programme, which is not an end but only a landmark, expresses as yet Kautsky’s ideas. But then, suddenly, it is no longer Kautsky; it is Lenin and Liebknecht who speak through this representative of their creed. “Political democracy is only a tool for us,” said Kunfi; “this political freedom is valuable to us only because we believe and hope that by its means we shall be able to carry through the great social transformation just as bloodlessly, and with as few victims, as we have managed to achieve the Hungarian Revolution.” “Long live the social revolution,” shouted the gallery. In his next words Kunfi answered the shout and in the exhilaration of this triumph gave himself away: “Our revolutionary work is not over yet! After reforming our institutions we shall have to alter mankind!”