CHAPTER XII. _December 8th._ My way took me through the garden of the old Polytechnic. The place was black with people. In the great hall of the ‘Stork’s Fort’ Széklers and Transylvanian Hungarians were gathered together. The streets poured forth their masses: the crush up there must have been awful. I stopped against the railings and looked at the passers-by, excited officers, Székler soldiers, sad, care-worn people—homeless, every one of them. All their faces were of the Hungarian type. These are the people of whom the radical press of Budapest writes that they ought to be expelled, because there is a scarcity of lodgings! Would these papers dare to write such a thing of, say, Englishmen, Frenchmen or Italians? Can it be imagined that we should expel from their own capital these unfortunate people, while foreign refugees, who could have returned home long ago, have filled the houses? In the first year of the war caravans of Galician Jews clad in gabardines fled before the Russian invasion. They were Austrian citizens, but the Hungarian capital received them nevertheless. They stayed on and have enriched themselves. And now, when homeless Hungarians are coming back, the Budapest press of the Hungarian Government shows them the door. A big crowd of men came towards the garden, good looking, shabbily dressed gentlemen, who might have been officials who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to the invading Roumanians or Czechs. They reminded me of a declaration of the socialist Minister for Public Welfare, Kunfi: “As we are going to be a smaller country, we shall not be able to support the many officials of old Hungary. These will have to seek their living in America.” We have come to this! The radical press of the immigrants advocates the expulsion of the Hungarian refugees, and the Minister of Public Welfare advises the native Hungarian intellectuals to emigrate! So there is no more room for us in our own country? It is a wicked, devilish game. Words are used as keys to open the dark underground passages which undermine our country. The War Minister of Károlyi’s Government says to the Hungarian army “I never want to see a soldier again.” The Minister for Nationalities ruins our fellow nationals and hands them over to the yoke of foreigners. The Minister of Finance says: “I don’t want to see a rich man; I shall impose such taxes in Hungary as the history of the world has never known.” The Prime Minister declares that whoever invades Hungary, we shall appeal to the judgment of the civilised world, but we won’t draw sword against the invader. Just then some Transylvanian undergraduates dragged a little cart into the middle of the garden. A Transylvanian soldier was standing on it and he shouted out what had been discussed up in the hall. “We will rise to arms. We swear it by our freedom, fifteen hundred years old!”