a coherent policy for central or eastern Europe.  Even when Hungary had a government friendly to the Entente they never obtained any advantage from it.  They had had no use for Count Karolyi.  They had allowed things to slip and slide, and permitted—­nay, helped—­Bolshevism to thrive, although they had brand-marked it as a virulent epidemic to be drastically stamped out.  Temper, education, and training disqualified them for seizing opportunity and pressing the levers that stood ready to their hand.

In consequence of the vacillation of the two chiefs, who seldom stood firm in the face of difficulties, the members of the predatory gang which concealed its alien origin under Magyar nationality and its criminal propensities[155] under a political mask had been enabled to go on playing an odious comedy, to the disgust of sensible people and the detriment of the new and enlarged states of Europe.  For the cost of the Supreme Council’s weakness had to be paid in blood and substance, little though the two delegates appeared to realize this.  The extent to which the ruinous process was carried out would be incredible were it not established by historic facts and documents.

The permanent agents of the Powers in Hungary,[156] preferring conciliation to force, now exhorted the Hungarians to rid themselves of Kuhn and promised in return to expel the Rumanians from Hungarian territory once more and to have the blockade raised.  At the close of July some Magyars from Austria met Kuhn at a frontier station[157] and strove to persuade him to withdraw quietly into obscurity, but he, confiding in the policy of the Allies and his star, scouted the suggestion.  It was at this juncture that the Rumanians, pushing on to Budapest, resolved, come what might, to put an end to the intolerable situation and to make a clean job of it once for all.  And they succeeded.

For Rumania’s initial military reverse[158] was the result of a surprise attack by some eighty thousand men.  But her troops rapidly regained their warlike spirit, recrossed the river Tisza, shattered the Neo-Bolshevist regime, and reached the environs of Budapest.

By the 1st of August the lawless band that was ruining the country relinquished the reins of power, which were taken over at first by a Socialist Cabinet of which an influential French press organ wrote:  “The names of the new ... commissaries of the people tell us nothing, because their bearers are unknown.  But the endings of their names tell us that most of them are, like those of the preceding government, of Jewish origin.  Never since the inauguration of official communism did Budapest better deserve the appellation of Judapest, which was assigned to it by the late M. Lueger, chief of the Christian Socialists of Vienna.  That is an additional trait in common with the Russian Soviets."[159]