Such are the present ones. When they have passed they still look back at us and mumble something that sounds like “there is worse to come.” We refuse to believe it, our common-sense revolts against the prophecy, because our common-sense has come to the end of its power of enduring misfortune. Even jungles come to an end, and if they do not we tear a path through the tangle of their thorns, tread them down, and, at the price of whatever wounds and loss of blood, regain the open country. The masses have lost their illusions concerning Károlyi’s republic, for they are colder and hungrier than ever. History always reaches a turning point when there is no more bread and misery becomes past endurance. Logically there must be a change, and what change could there be but the resurrection of the country? Hope, which has come to naught, must become a reality in March.... At any rate we flatter ourselves with this belief, so that we may find strength for life and work though the streets whisper a different tale, nay, sometimes they shout it aloud, and last Thursday they baptised it with blood to prove that they meant it. Béla Kún’s staff has called the work-shirking rabble together. One day they stir the people up against the landlords, next day they agitate among the disbanded soldiers to induce them to raise impossible claims; to-day it was the turn of the unemployed. Potatoes are rotting in the ground and last year’s maize cannot be gathered. There is nobody in the town to sweep the streets, to cart the garbage, to carry a load. At the railway station starving officers do porters’ work. The evicted officials of occupied territories hire themselves out as labourers on farms. Meanwhile at their meetings the Communists court the idle rabble: “You have lost your jobs in consequence of the terrible bath of blood; the time has come to get your own back; up, to arms!”