In the evening I mentioned the incident to my mother, and she too had heard of the man called Béla Kún. His real name was Berele Kohn, the son of a Galician Jew who came over the frontier with a pack on his back. He himself had risen to be a journalist and the secretary of the Socialist party in Kolozsvár, from which job he went to the Workman’s Benevolent Society. There he stole. The war saved him from prosecution. He was called up, and sent to the Russian front, where he soon managed to surrender. Through his international racial connections he got to Moscow, where he fell in with Trotski, and from then onward carried on his propaganda among prisoners. He became the leader in Russia of the Jewish Communists from Hungary, edited a Hungarian paper called “The Social Revolution,” and finally joined a Bolshevist directorate in one of the smaller towns and played his part in the atrocities committed there. “I heard,” my mother said, “that he came back with a lot of Russian money. Károlyi’s government does not interfere with him in any way.” “Of course; Károlyi is said to be in communication with Trotski through Diener-Dénes and Landler,” I replied. Károlyi went to Switzerland in the autumn of 1917 with Diener-Dénes and Jászi, who introduced him to Henri Guilbeaux, an extreme syndicalist and defeatist editor, who used his newspaper to work for the same moral dissolution which was carried to power in Russia by Lenin and Trotski. It is said that it was this Guilbeaux who converted Károlyi to the ideas which Béla Kún has now come to represent among us. Later came the congratulatory wire of the Soviet’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, the destructive work of the Radical and Socialist ministers, the confirmation of Pogány’s Soldiers’ Council and of his system of confidential shop-stewards and the unrestricted freedom of communist agitators.... These are signs of his guilt, and they are a dark augury for the future. This is a new milestone which fills us with apprehension, another one of those measures which are meant to undermine the existing Social order. The great French Revolution was fatally influenced from the day that the people and the rabble of Paris stormed the Arsenal and plundered it. In Budapest no force is required. The Police Commissioner himself has instructed the police and the people’s guards to confiscate all arms and ammunition from those who possess no permit—and nowadays permits are only given to workmen and the mob. That is another breach in the power of resistance of the middle classes and in the sanctity of the home. Henceforth the people’s guards have the right to search for arms. The citizens are helpless, and I hear that everywhere people are giving up their shotguns and revolvers.