The news has only just reached us. When the Rádays heard of the proclamation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they wanted to go to Budapest with the manager of the aeroplane works. But the Communists of Aszód were quicker than they. They closed the barriers, and the Lord Lieutenant of the county and his wife, who had nursed the wounded in the hospital of Aszód during the war, were escorted back by armed Red soldiers, some of whom she had herself nursed back to life. They locked the Countess up in the Reformatory, the Count and the manager they put up against the wall. A firing squad was drawn up: a lieutenant enquired if all was ready. At the last moment they let them go. It was all done for amusement, to give them a good fright. One often hears of such things nowadays; the novelty and strangeness of it are wearing off. Countess Ráday did not know that her husband was still alive until he returned to her. But this villainy was relieved by a generous action. When the people of Iklad heard what had been done to their landlord and benefactor, they rose and armed themselves with scythes, and went to his rescue, but before they reached Aszód the prisoners had been sent to Budapest. For a long time this band of armed peasants threatened the Reformatory. Unfortunately not every village is like Iklad and not all landlords like Count Ráday. Other news reached us too, uncertainly and stealthily, from castles and towns. Then the first newspapers came from the capital: the great day they had prepared and announced had at last dawned, and we shrank from its contact. With what a voice was it proclaimed! Our language had never yet been prostituted in this way, their alien press uses our tongue to torture us. It spits on our past with grinning contempt and drags in the mire everything that might still promise a better future. The triumph of the revolution howls from its pages. Vulgar brutalities, foaming, abject hatred, are enclosed in the wrappings of world-saving theories. The only paper of the Counter-revolution has been suppressed: the conservative _Budapesti Hirlap_ has been strangled and the subscribers sent ‘The Red Newspaper.’ The newspapers which have been allowed to continue their existence approve, fawn, incite and lend their old reputation to facilitate the conquest of the groping, tottering countryside. Unsuspecting people absorb the poison from the papers to which they have been accustomed. Ideas become confused; even the honest lose their bearings. The papers propagate their news as ordered by the head of the Bolshevist press-directorate—a Jew.