The event provokes a few sardonic lines, set among the brief news items of the Red papers. The French mob shouted insults at its King when he was taken to the Temple. To-day the rabble shouts too. But the Hungarian nation has nothing in common with the rabble. The same crowd which knocked down one night the statue of Francis Joseph in Budapest and smashed the effigies of kings on the millenary memorial, is now vomiting insults shamelessly in the columns of its newspapers. But it is the foreign hand, the foreign voice, that acts and speaks. The double-headed eagle which swooped down on so many thrones of Europe, has returned with broken wings to the mountains. Its shadow passed like a cloud over the fields of lost battles. A short notice is all that the foreigners’ press has to give to the King of Hungary. Those who fawned before him in endless columns so long as they could use him against the country, now have no more to give to him when he in turn can give no longer. Cowardice knows no mean between cringing and slinging mud. As for the Hungarians, whatever they may think, in presence of the misfortune of a man and a King, they bow respectfully and in silence. King Charles IV. expiates not only his own mistakes, but those of his predecessors for four centuries. The descendant pays with the loss of his country, because the ancestors would never make Hungary their home. The dynasty allowed its advisers systematically to weaken Hungary. And this camarilla, to keep the people of the Great Plain in check, has let loose upon it every possible nationality, ending with the immigrant gabardined fathers of Béla Kun and Számuelly. But it was not alone upon us, it was upon them too. The Habsburgs never understood that our strength was their strength and our weakness their weakness. Their whole country was made up of peoples which were attracted by their kindred beyond the borders. The peoples of the Monarchy were all looking outward. The petted Austrians looked towards Germany, the Poles towards Warsaw, their favourites, the Czechs, towards the Slav giant, the Roumanians towards young Roumania, the Southern Slavs towards Serbia, the Italians towards Italy, the Jews towards the Jewish Internationale. The Hungarians alone had no such kin. We did not look longingly anywhere, nobody tempted us beyond the frontiers. And yet the rulers preferred all the other peoples to us, and loaded them with goods, treasures and power. And now the peoples have gone, taking with them our land, our goods, our treasures. This is the harvest of four hundred years policy of _divide et impera_; the peoples are divided, but the Habsburgs rule no longer over them. Between the torn pieces the crown has fallen to the ground. * * * * * _April 8th._