Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage. Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918--March 1919); the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March--August); and the more recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to describe. The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg, the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the Balkans and the Black Sea.