The first national congress of Soviets is meeting to-day in Budapest. On the previous two days the Communist party held meetings in the Hungarian House of Parliament. I began to read the report: “There was a red shine in the eyes....” Then I stopped: a grimy old wall in Budapest came to my mind, a glaring red poster sticking to it.... And under a blue sky a giant labourer was furiously painting the House of Parliament red with a brush that dripped.... [Illustration: THE EXECUTIONERS OF SZÁMUELLY’S “DEATH TRAIN.” (Hanged 29 Dec., 1919.) ] I continued to read the account of the Communists’ general meeting. The reporter, with the traditional rapture for everything that is new, gushed over the aspect of the altered assembly room in the House of Parliament. The old frescoes have disappeared, and instead of the sacred crown above the chairman’s seat, “a fierce-looking labourer with a Phrygian cap is contemplating the place, with the Soviet’s five-pointed star above his heart. On the wall there are no longer pictures of ‘historical celebrities,’ nor of ‘glorious battles,’—new strokes of the brush have transformed them into symbolical, grandiose decorations.” How they hurry to cover and efface everything that was ours! Yet even while they are painting their ordinances with our blood, every successive beat of the country’s heart is louder and louder, more and more threatening. “What have you done with our country? With our language, our honour, the purity of our children, the memory of our greatness? The throbbing of the Hungarian blood bodes ill, but they hear it not, though the anger of a deeply insulted nation is boiling up around them. They will not hear, they plunder and murder as before and hold meetings in the stolen house of our stolen country. Their newspaper chroniclers record with satisfied racial self-consciousness the arrival of the delegates: “They entered without the slightest embarrassment, without emotion, without fuss.” The strength and misfortune of the Jewish race are that it is surprised by nothing and does not believe in the aims which it professes. I thought of the great hall where once the noble figure of Stephen Tisza dominated so many storms, and I thought also of those who could never have invaded the place had they not passed over his dead body. They do not know it, but they are going to their ordeal, for even as they speak the blood begins to ooze out of the country’s open wound.[4]