Were these men really capable of believing in the incredible,—of believing that the results of a social evolution of a thousand years could be changed in a single night by the help of bands of terrorists? Did they believe that they could violate human nature by means of their peremptory ‘orders’ (edicts), or that the world-revolution with which, as an inevitable certainty, they constantly sought to cajole their partisans would really hasten to their assistance? Did they honestly desire to ‘redeem’ the working classes,—which, in fact, they ruined,—with their devilish system? And is the bestiality of their instruments the only charge that can be laid at their doors? There were evidently some men among them who cherished such a belief and such a desire; but it would be extremely difficult to draw such a conclusion from the nature of their deeds. On the contrary, it is certain that almost all of them were actuated by the hope of personal aggrandizement, by a morbid and unbridled desire of omnipotence; they desired to seize for themselves everything that seemed of any value to them in the country and to destroy everything that stood in their way. An exceptionally favourable opportunity for the realization of their aims was afforded them by the desperate situation of the country and the lethargy of the exhausted bourgeois classes; and to this end they hastened to exploit the infatuation of the masses. Pre-eminent among them, alike for ability and for skill in the application of Bolshevik ideology, was the People’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, the keen-witted, astute and extraordinarily active Béla Kún,[8] who remained to the end the soul and leading spirit of the Red régime. Already during his activity as a provincial journalist, this lizard-faced, well-fed agitator had shown the greatest contempt for the morals in general acceptance among the middle classes and had consequently been only too ready to sell his pen as a means to hush up delinquencies committed by the bourgeoisie. He had been compelled, in consequence of petty embezzlements committed at the expense of the proletariat, to resign his post in the office of the Kolozsvár Workmen’s Insurance Institute. Earlier in life he had been a votary of night orgies; and during the ‘lean’ days of the Soviet régime he did not abstain from sumptuous banqueting, while everywhere the masses intoned the refrain of the Internationale, ‘Rise, starving proletarians, rise!’ As People’s Commissioner, he took up his quarters in a fashionable hotel on the Danube Embankment, under the protection of a body-guard armed with hand grenades. His inflammatory speeches, in which he employed all the hackneyed casuistry of the demagogue, at first exercised a suggestive influence even on the more sober-minded section of the working classes. He preached the necessity of an inexorable application of the dictatorship; and he himself—ignoring his own revolutionary