We are a pack of spell-bound sleep-walkers. The wizard glares at us with his big, oriental eyes and pronounces his spell, which varies according to the times: Democracy, Socialism. Yesterday the magic word was Liberalism, to-morrow it may be Communism. * * * * * _November 24th._ Nights are sleepless nowadays, yet I cannot work. As if every word of beauty had been engulfed by the mire through which I wade in day time, I cannot form a single idea. In the dreary desert of my brain nothing wanders but horrors: the morning brings them, and they are not banished by the end of the day. [Illustration: BELA KUN (KOHN). (_To face p. 160._)] I wrote some letters last night, and this morning I sent out for stamps. The maid put them on the writing table before me. What is this?—Printed across the portrait of the King, of the Queen, across the picture of the house of Parliament, there is the black surcharge: “Republic.” Printed over the beautiful little head of the Queen, “Republic”: the word runs across St. Stephen’s crown on the King’s head! A thought that has tortured me many times since the 16th of November once again wrings my heart: The crown, our crown.... It is not a jewel, it is not an ornament, it is not pomp, it is Hungary itself. Kingdoms have come and gone, but there was no people in this world to whom its crown meant so much as our crown meant to us. The Hungarian crown is every Hungarian soul, every clod of its soil, every Hungarian harvest. With it is torn from the country’s head not kingship alone, but all that we have been, all that we may ever be. From century to century the ancient symbol wrought in gold has been preserved in an iron-bound chest up there in the religious gloom of the castle of Buda; within the last thousand years it has only appeared in the light of day fifty-three times, borne on the heads of fifty-three Kings—over the Hungarian land. And once more, when a thousand years had passed, on the day of the Millenium.... Exposed to the public view, it lay on the altar of the Coronation Church. The people came, I saw them with my own eyes—gray-haired peasants, workmen, lords—and bent the knee in front of it as if before a holy thing. And I saw it on the head of King Charles on a December day, under the ancient walls of regal Buda, amidst the unfurled banners of sixty-three counties, amidst deafening cheers, amidst the sound of our great, clear, national anthem.