as though the plunderers would voluntarily give up their ill-gotten stores!  It was partly because of these restrictions that the Rumanian authorities resolved to take what belonged to them without more ado.  And they could not, they said, afford to wait, because they were expecting an attack by the Russian Bolsheviki and it behooved them to have done with one foe before taking on another.  These explanations irritated in lieu of calming the Supreme Council.

“Possibly,” wrote the well-informed Temps, “Rumania would have been better treated if she had closed with certain proposals of loans on crushing terms or complied with certain demands for oil concessions."[161] Possibly.  But surely problems of justice, equity, and right ought never to have been mixed up with commercial and industrial interests, whether with the connivance or by the carelessness of the holders of a vast trust who needed and should have merited unlimited confidence.  It is neither easy nor edifying to calculate the harm which transactions of this nature, whether completed or merely inchoate, are capable of inflicting on the great community for whose moral as well as material welfare the Supreme Council was laboring in darkness against so many obstacles of its own creation.  Is it surprising that the states which suffered most from these weaknesses of the potent delegates should have resented their misdirection and endeavored to help themselves as best they could?  It may be blameworthy and anti-social, but it is unhappily natural and almost unavoidable.  It is sincerely to be regretted that the art of stimulating the nations—­about which the delegates were so solicitous—­to enthusiastic readiness to accept the Council as the “moral guide of the world” should have been exercised in such bungling fashion.

The Supreme Council then feeling impelled to assert its dignity against the wilfulness of a small nation decided on ignoring alike the service and the disservice rendered by Rumania’s action.  Accordingly, it proceeded without reference to any of the recent events except the disappearance of the Bolshevist gang.  Four generals were accordingly told off to take the conduct of Hungarian affairs into their hands despite their ignorance of the actual conditions of the problem.[162] They were ordered to disarm the Magyars, to deliver up Hungary’s war material to the Allies, of whom only the Rumanians and the Czechoslovaks had taken the field against the enemy since the conclusion of the armistice the year before, and they were also to exercise their authority over the Rumanian victors and the Serbs, both of whom occupied Hungarian territory.  The Temps significantly remarked that the Supreme Council, while not wishing to deal with any Hungarian government but one qualified to represent the country, “seems particularly eager to see resumed the importation of foreign wares into Hungary.  Certain persons appear to fear that Rumania, by retaking from the Magyars wagons and engines, might check the resumption of this traffic."[163]