But more foreign still to this country than the rabble of strangers were the leading People’s Commissioners themselves, though all were born on Hungarian soil. They hated, not merely the bourgeoisie, but the whole Hungarian people, with whom they never had anything in common. Their hatred was most violent against the agricultural peasant class, which forms the bulk of the nation, whereas the industrial labourers represent barely more than five per cent. of the whole population. While at Petrograd, in the service of Lenin, Béla Kún had had Hungarian prisoners of war, officers and privates alike, shot _en masse_ with machine-guns, for refusing to join the Russian Red Army. When the future People’s Commissioners, laden with Russian gold, emerged from obscurity, they pushed into the background the former leaders of the working classes. In their incendiary speeches and newspaper articles could be heard the hissing of the vipers of hatred. The terrible trials of the four and a half years’ war, its demoralising effect, the exorbitant demands advanced after the defeat by soldiers embittered by battle and grown accustomed to a distaste for a life of work, the unemployment caused by the shortage of raw materials, and the discontent of the industrial labourers that had long been lurking beneath the surface,—all these circumstances in a few months ripened the seeds sown by the wicked and unscrupulous agitation of the adventurers. Their adherents consisted, besides a few educated persons of disordered intellect[7] or greedy of profit, of a small fraction of socialist labourers (who terrorized the rest of their fellows) and the mob described above.