If the practices of Buda-Pest had been less flagrant one would write of Hungary's decomposition with a certain sympathy. It is conceivable that in the British Empire there are anti-British elements whose aims would commonly be classed by the authorities as "mad ambitions," which is what Count Apponyi called the separatist tendencies of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary. But--may the platitude be pardoned!--there is all the difference between the spirit in which the alien rule of the one government was, and of the other is, administered. No doubt there are portions of the British Empire in which a plebiscite would have the same disintegrating result as it would have had in most of the regions that have been lopped from Hungary. We, with our Allies, declined to permit a plebiscite in Hungary's late territories, since we believed that the population had overwhelmingly displayed its wishes at the end of the War; and an Englishman may hope to escape the charge of hypocrisy if he does not permit the withholding of a plebiscite from certain of his fellow-subjects to prevent him from alluding with satisfaction to those who have been liberated from the sway of Buda-Pest. (a) IN SYRMIA Everywhere the dawn was breaking for the Habsburg's Southern Slavs. At Vukovar in Syrmia--to take an example--there was formed, as elsewhere, a National Council. Under Baron Joseph Rajacsich, a grandson of the Patriarch and--to all appearances--a brother of Falstaff, the Council maintained order until the coming of the Serbian army. An Austrian naval captain with a floating arsenal, four steamers and twenty-two drifters, was held up, as he proposed to sail towards Buda-Pest, by being told of a battery at Dalja, higher up the Danube. However, the Vukovar townsfolk, in view of a possible explosion, begged that the prisoner, who had wept at being stopped, should be sent on his way. The German harbour-master, a lieutenant, assured the Baron that he would assist him if he were allowed to keep his liberty. But he was tempted, in the middle of a night, to assist two German captains who were trying to get through, each with a string of drifters. Rajacsich, whose armed force consisted of forty Serbian ex-prisoners and fifty of his own workmen--he armed them with what he found on the drifters--had no means of stopping the German boats. But after telephoning in vain to the ex-harbour-master, he fired a shot into one of the boats, which fortunately found the kitchen, and made such a terrible noise among the pots and pans that the Germans considered it more prudent to remain. The Baron succeeded in sending back to Belgrade altogether 39 steamers and 217 loaded drifters, which contained booty, even from the Ukraine, that was valued at about a milliard crowns; ... but the Austro-Hungarians managed to get away with a considerable amount of plunder. The people of Buda-Pest were surprised, on the morning of November 5, to find the _Sophie_, one of the most luxurious passenger